One-Note Wonder

With the bright, splashy colors that huge success and a 38-piece band and orchestra can afford, Yanni paints a glowing, idealized musical portrait of humanity as he thinks it can be.

The classically handsome, Greek-born dabbler in pop/classical/world/New Age fusion clearly is impervious to critics whose temperament and taste crave music immersed in the complexities, contradictions and cankers of humanity as it is. When it comes to getting Homo sapiens to plunk down at the box office, a little flattery never hurts.

Having played the Acropolis in his most successful gig (his album “Yanni: Live at the Acropolis” passed 7 million in sales worldwide and the video version became a PBS staple), Yanni might consider some bits of wisdom that originated in that neighborhood: the Platonic notion of ideal forms and the classical Athenian virtue of moderation in all things.

His 2 1/2-hour concert Wednesday at the Arrowhead Pond of Anaheim had some worthy points, but most of it was leaden stuff, gargantuan in scale but missing the contrasts and balances of truly classical form. Yanni’s long, repetitious compositions can all be boiled down to one or two moods or ideas (mystery giving way to enlightenment in “Deliverance,” or the sense of unbridled triumph that dominated much of the music).

It was like Kenny G with more toys: A musical hook would be stated, restated, and repeated again and again; even in some highly energized passages where talented violin and saxophone soloists went face to face in flying duets, they gave off the aura but not the substance of exciting interplay, parroting each other’s lines instead of throwing out fresh possibilities.

During a pause, Yanni extolled diversity (and reflected it in a band whose wind instrumentation alone included traditional flutes or horns culled from Armenia, China, Australia and South America). But his music reflected the simplistic diversity of cultural meld, rather than the thornier, richer diversity of a good argument, vigorously but peaceably pursued (another of the Acropolis’ more significant cultural hand-me-downs).

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On the plus side, even if he does fancy himself a potential guru, Yanni was likably low-key and capable of light jests. Given the unyielding earnestness of his music, bits of between-songs humor helped greatly.

Presiding beatifically from his stacks of keyboards, Yanni opened the floor for some marvelous players, especially violinist Karen Briggs, a leonine woman who sported a pineapple-like pile of dreadlocks while playing with a singed tone reminiscent of fiery Bluegrass fiddlers. Singers Vann Johnson and Alfreda Gerald were excellent, lending ardor and purity to their mostly wordless vocal leads. Splendid sound clarity and good use of video screens for close-ups drew a listener in as much as taste could permit; Yanni’s concept may be all wrong, but his execution was flawless.

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Yanni can find his Platonic ideal not at any of the monuments he has used as concert backdrops (his set focused on “Tribute,” a new album recorded last year at the Taj Mahal and Beijing’s Forbidden City), but in a compact, three-minute hit from 1968: “Classical Gas.” Mason Williams’ sparkling, tightly woven opus for guitar and orchestra moves between intimacy and grandeur, finding some interesting variations along the way.

The highlights of Yanni’s show were “Love Is All,” in which Johnson’s urgent--and curiously underamplified--vocal called to mind Whitney Houston tempered by Tina Turner, and “Niki Nana (We’re One),” a celebratory approximation of African pop. Each benefited from scorching vocal talent, and, for Yanni, an unusually direct, unlarded song construction.

It apparently isn’t in Yanni to complicate his odes to the power of positive thinking, but that shouldn’t stop him from considering “Classical Gas,” and trying to sound less gaseous.