Hearing Audra McDonald sing live is one of the great pleasures in music today. She has a tremendous voice. Her pitch is perfect and her sense of timing is also exquisite. She opens her mouth and this tremendously powerful instrument just opens up in the most natural-seeming way.

 

McDonald is a great star on Broadway, the winner of three Tonys, and also does some film and TV acting. Watching her at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall on Saturday, I found her acting the least convincing part of her performance. She takes a very spare approach when singing in concert, standing still at the mike, her arms still at her sides, or perhaps raised to make a small chopping gesture with her hands. Her face lights up into an enormous smile when she's done but often while she's singing about love and its disappointments, her mouth and eyes are stretched into a rictus of pain. Still, her voice is so pure and true that you don't feel that you're been put at a remove by the careful manner in which she presents herself.

 

By contrast, Barbara Cook is all openness. Cook is also a Broadway star, from way back -- she's nearly 80. Her approach is different. Her pitch is also perfect, higher than McDonald's and lighter. You're much more conscious of Cook's acting. She moves around more and uses her eyes quite a bit to express delight or yearning. Cook, in fact, is all about a kind of optimistic yearning.

 

Her manner weds the performance to the actual emotion. In other words, her gestures and expressions are clearly practiced, and yet she seems to be putting real emotion into a song. She's acting, yet at the same time expressing real vulnerability. She seems to inhabit a song as though she were truly a musical character, expressing what she has to say through these particular lyrics. Cook is able to make even trite material like "Accentuate the Positive" fresh in this way.

 

For all that over-analysis, the concert was mainly a pure pleasure in listening to two great singers who really know what they're doing. Sharing the stage with a trio that included McDonald's bassist husband, the two would sing together, their voices blending together surpassingly well, and then sit and watch the other in admiration for sets of four or five songs apiece.

 

Cook was old show business, singing Rodgers and Hammerstein songs and telling stories about "Dick" Rodgers' interior decor. McDonald, as she tends to do, was more interested in digging out more obscure material, tunes by Sondheim from shows that weren't hits or pieces by other living composers from shows that were never actually produced.

 

I've had the chance to hear Cook live several times in recent years and continue to be impressed by her ability to inhabit a song such as "This Nearly Was Mine," from "South Pacific." But for me McDonald is the more dazzling live performer, just so awesomely gifted and a pleasure to listen to.

 

This is not a concert that would be to every taste, but it was a classic of its kind. Leaving the hall, I heard one of the many gay men who had attended say, "Next to Streisand, this is the best concert ever. I'm still shaking."