Singing Along With Bobby

Bobby McFerrin’s greatest gift to his audience may be changing them from spectators into celebrants and transforming a concert hall into a playground, a village center, a joyous space.

McFerrin had the audience at a Pacific Chorale concert Saturday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center singing--quite beautifully--in parts, as he directed their entrances and spun out light-voiced impromptu chants in the vocal heights.

He had them and the chorus twining their fingers to “Itsy-Bitsy Spider” (“It’s only half a song without the choreography,” he said) and standing up to touch “Head, Shoulder, Knees, Feet” in another sing-along. The crowd was ecstatic.

“OK, settle down, children,” he said.

The electricity began with McFerrin’s first entrance to conduct Faure’s Requiem, but he modestly deflected all the attention to the soloists--soprano Hila Plitmann and baritone James Martin Schaefer--and the chorus. More about that later.

The energy came unleashed when baritone Carver Cossey appeared with the choir as a charismatic soloist in two of the three a cappella spirituals (“Ev’ry Time I Feel the Spirit” and “Ain’t Got Time to Die”). The Chorale, prepared during artistic director John Alexander’s current sabbatical by chorus master Dennis Houser, sang the third, “Poor Man Lazarus,” with infectious spirit.

That spirit grew more intense as McFerrin did a series of solo and group improvisations, including his singing the arpeggio accompaniment while the chorus sang the melody of the Bach-Gounod “Ave Maria.” He concluded this segment with his legendary performance of all the parts in “The Wizard of Oz.”

At such times, McFerrin is an inspiring conduit of music and the center from which and around which a community forms. The puzzle is figuring out why his conducting of Faure fell short of this standard.

He led a perfectly respectable performance, with sculpted phrases and sensitivity to words. But it was a cautious, overly respectful approach that did not plumb all the depths. The kinetic drive and inevitability so evident elsewhere in his leadership sounded minimal here. Ditto the dramatic shifts.

The Requiem was presented in a chamber orchestra version intended to recapture the composer’s original setting (later hugely orchestrated). William Wells was the organist. Pacific Symphony concertmaster Raymond Kobler led the 19-member ensemble drawn from that orchestra. Not all the familiar details, however, could be savored.

The 165-voice chorus sang with honed, focused sound, damped down not to overwhelm the light accompaniment. Plitmann sang with crystalline brightness, Schaefer with careful competence.

For the single encore, McFerrin led the Chorale in his own version of the 23rd Psalm, dedicated to his mother, Sara McFerrin, an Orange County resident who taught at Fullerton College for 20 years.