POP MUSIC REVIEWS : Mary Black Shows the Soul of Erin

Mary Black looks very much like the next big Irish pop star in a pantheon that already includes Enya, Sinead O’Connor, Maire Brennan and Dolores Keane.

Her performance at Wadsworth Theater on Saturday started a bit slowly, with Black sounding fairly subdued. Backed by a first-rate sextet, she sang a mixed bag of pleasant, if not always gripping selections by John Gorka, Mary-Chapin Carpenter and Noel Brazil.

About halfway through her program, however, the intensity level rose. Black claims English folk-rock great Sandy Denny as a primary influence, but the subtle inner passions of her more focused readings were equally reminiscent of early Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell, despite a complete dissimilarity in timbre.

Blessed with a dark and pliant voice, she moved easily from the mournful keening of the traditional “The Holy Ground” to a more folk-like interpretation of the same subject in a song by Gerry O’Beirne. Determined to be stylistically unrestricted, she also produced an impressive version of Billie Holiday’s “Don’t Explain,” which was flawed only by being pitched a third or so above Black’s most effective range.

Other numbers included fragments of jazz rhythms, country sounds and Irish tradition. She closed a second encore, appropriately, with a white-hot, impassioned rendering of a song about the emerald shores of Ireland.