POP MUSIC REVIEW : Stewart: Plugged In, but the Connection Is Weak : The 49-year-old rocker’s fast-paced show at the Anaheim Pond seems geared toward fulfilling audience requirements, thus keeping the artist fairly detached.

When it comes to aging, some pop music artists wear it well. Think of Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen--there’s a lengthening list of performers who are finding ways to deepen their art and preserve their dignity as they approach and pass the half-century mark.

It’s not so easy for Rod Stewart. His initial appeal in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s was based on a youthful bravado that would be unseemly to revive at age 49. He’s not primarily a songwriter, so he can’t really develop that side of things. What to do?

The solution that Stewart has proposed on his current tour--which came to the Anaheim Pond on Sunday and ends its run there tonight after nine months on the road--is a frantically paced arena-rock vehicle that drives him at high speed away from his remaining viable strength--as a vocal interpreter.

Sunday’s two-hour-plus concert was so pumped up that it left him no room to breathe. “Every Picture Tells a Story,” from 1971, is his pinnacle as a songwriter and a pretty indestructible song, but Stewart rushed through it as if he thought its essence is its hammering beat rather than its wry, picaresque coming-of-age narrative. He seemed utterly detached from the story the song tells.

That’s pretty much how it went as Stewart operated from a stage planted like a boxing ring in the center of the arena’s floor. Sitting on a stool on a raised platform for the softer stuff and working the edges on the rockers, he served up an indiscriminate set of everything from his disco dreck to his appealingly warm, mainstream ballads to old soul and rock ‘n’ roll hits.

*

His voice has lost some of its pliancy with the years, but it still has that great raspy texture, full of longing and ache. But the impersonal, flavorless sound of his band didn’t really allow him to reach into the songs and reveal their essence, and moments of real conviction were fleeting.

Make no mistake, it was a crowd-pleasing show. But it was a panorama without context or taste, geared toward satisfying an audience’s presumed requirements rather than establishing a purposeful artist’s agenda. The retrospective emphasis only underscored the lack of current creative vitality in a career that’s doing fine commercially, thanks at the moment to the success of his “Unplugged” album.

There were times, as Stewart navigated the stage and worked the crowd, that he seemed genuinely to connect with the audience, and his face would light up with pleasure and surprise. But the moment would pass and he’d seem almost regretful that it was time to race to the other side or go off and change costumes. There used to be self-mockery in his swagger, but now his movements telegraph an almost desperate need for adulation.