Thrilling? Certainly. Happy birthday

To say that Barbara Cook was in great voice Saturday night is a little like saying the Pacific Ocean was marvelously blue the other day. Yes, and the sun was bright and the breeze cool. What else is new? We already know that Cook is a national treasure, the premier interpreter of the American musical songbook working today.

Yet the evening had an aura of something special. For one thing, this single-performance event was held at Walt Disney Concert Hall, an acoustical jewel box that allowed her lilting soprano to shimmer in all its radiant color. For another, the eclectic program kept circling back to Stephen Sondheim, the songwriter whose lyrical complexity always brings out the best in her. And finally, she celebrated this last week -- incredible as it seems when you’re in her ageless company -- her 80th birthday.

Ladies and gentlemen, there is breaking news to report: We have scientific evidence that it is indeed possible for a singer who has reached the four-score mark to be just hitting her prime.

Anyone who was lucky enough to be in attendance on Saturday can verify that this isn’t mere politeness toward a senior. Cook sounded as good as she ever has since she remade herself from a musical-theater ingenue (the original Marian the librarian in “The Music Man”) to a cabaret artist able to illuminate a repertory of standards with the hard knocks and joyful kicks of an examined life.

Last time I caught her, I thought she was a bit shy about venturing into her upper register. But there was no conventional dithering in her final flourish of “I’m in Love With a Wonderful Guy,” Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ebullient ditty from “South Pacific.” And she confidently scaled the heights of “Nobody Else but Me,” Kern and Hammerstein’s delightful addition to “Show Boat.”

Disney Hall’s unique combination of intimacy and spaciousness enabled us to observe how Cook conveys the spirit of a song. She doesn’t merely slip into the mind of the character who may be singing; she taps into the attitudes and emotions of the composer and lyricist as they wrote it, inhabiting the secret communication of the words and music.

Much of the show dwelt on the happy bewilderment of love. If anyone wants to recall exactly what it’s like to be in that first flush of romance, they ought to listen to Cook sing Irving Berlin’s “I Got Lost in His Arms.” For daydreamy infatuation, check out her version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “It Might as Well Be Spring.” And for the sustaining power of memory after heartbreak, there’s no topping her rendition of Arlen and Mercer’s “I Had Myself a True Love.”

But it’s Sondheim who invites her to submerge deeper into herself. She sang one of the starkly unromantic love-letter songs from “Passion,” which she interestingly called “Stephen’s second-best piece after ‘Sweeney Todd.’ ” And she captured the complicated truth of “No One Is Alone” from “Into the Woods,” with its haunting lines, “You decide what’s good / You decide alone. / But, no one is alone,” epitomizing the composer’s intricate genius.

Lee Musiker, her pianist and musical director, anchored the evening in a jazz idiom that was elegantly enhanced by Peter Donovan on bass and James Saporito on drums. The trio encouraged Cook to swing with numbers associated with her late friend Bobby Short, and they were there to try again when she momentarily stumbled during an Al Jolson song newly incorporated into her act.

The hall erupted into a chorus of “Happy Birthday” before her finale, but then how else could we thank her for the way she “spread joy (up to the maximum)” not just in her handling of “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive” but throughout her long and still astonishingly fresh career.

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charles.mcnulty@latimes.com