Who’s That Riveting Girl?

A popular rock act gets back together after 10 years apart, comes into the new Staples Center and knocks ‘em dead with a stirring, emotional, personality-packed demonstration of pop music’s range and power.

Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, right?

Did somebody say Eurythmics? Right again.

The difference, of course, is that everyone expected it from Springsteen last month. When Eurythmics headlined on Thursday, who knew?

Sure, there’s the English duo’s long catalog of ‘80s hits, and memories of some dynamic shows from that decade. But that didn’t prepare you for either the durability of those songs or for singer Annie Lennox’s commanding performance on Thursday.

Even with a trace of hoarseness shadowing her voice and with the limitations of the arena acoustics, Lennox was riveting as singer and performer. You didn’t want to take your eyes off her for one moment of the two-hour show, for fear of missing a crucial signal or a flash of illumination.

It was hard to believe that she’s hardly been on stage at all for a decade, such was her ease and rapport with her audience. But it was her intensity that really launched this concert into the stratosphere.

Strutting around the stage in her camouflage suit, snapping her thin arms and legs on the beats, drilling the crowd with laser gazes through her shaded glasses, she gave the soul-flavored rock numbers a joyously epic scale, then summoned the intimacy of a cabaret singer.

When Lennox and her partner Dave Stewart, who plays guitar and writes and arranges the music, hit it big in 1983 with the synth-pop hit “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” Eurythmics looked as if it could be a short-lived novelty. But as the team expanded its soul music and pop elements, it built a body of music that dug into the knots of romance with more depth and maturity than most popular acts. And Lennox’s voice, alternately caressing and confrontational, was up to that challenge.

Their new reunion album, “Peace,” lives up to their standards without returning to their earlier styles, and the four songs from the record they played Thursday worked to nudge things away from nostalgia.

Everything Lennox did, whether playful--notably a mid-show segment that gathered the duo’s eight instrumentalists and singers around a piano at center stage for a semi-acoustic segment--or dead-serious, was braced by a sense of dignity and higher purpose.

All their shows (there’s just one other one planned for the U.S. now, Tuesday in New York) are benefits for Amnesty International and Greenpeace, and Eurythmics’ range from the personal to the global can be summed up in the way Lennox made romantic betrayal seem as monumental as a gash through the Earth in “Who’s That Girl,” then, in the new “Peace Is Just a Word,” transfigured the planet’s political and environmental woes into her impossibly broken heart.