Familiar notes from a French chanteuse

Patricia Kaas has been a pop star in her native France since the late ‘80s. Fluent in that country’s entertaining version of rock music, she also demonstrated an impressive command of more traditional genres. In her latest album, “Piano Bar,” Kaas dips into the sort of songs one might hear in a French cabaret -- some tracing to film music -- and offers a fascinating reversal by singing some of the French-associated songs in English, and some of the English-associated songs in French.

Sunday at the Universal Amphitheatre, she opened her two-hour set with a few selections from the album: the theme from “A Man and a Woman,” sung in French as “Un Homme et une Femme”; “The Windmills of Your Mind,” sung in French as “Les Moulins de Mon Coeur”; and Jacques Brel’s classic “Ne Me Quitte Pas” in the English version, “If You Go Away.”

The mood was low-key and her sound was breathy and intimate -- precisely the right interpretive ambience for a piano bar atmosphere (if a bit too laid-back, at times, for the broad Amphitheatre stage).

The balance of the set took the energy level higher, roving freely across Kaas’ career. Reaching back to her earliest hit, “Mademoiselle Chante le Blues,” it included songs such as “La Mer,” “La Vie En Rose” (in an oddly harmonized rendition), “I Wish You Love” and “Autumn Leaves.” As the program progressed, she drew the most enthusiastic response from a multinational crowd eager to hear her run through a catalog of familiar items. And for the most part she obliged their wishes.

Sometimes strolling the stage with the panache of a rock star, occasionally transforming herself into a streetwise gamin, making a quick costume change between numbers, she was the very definition of a consummate musical artist.