On stage, Tony Bennett says things like "Wow!", "look out," "you're beautiful," "this wonderful audience," and "Mr. Sinatra." His hand gestures and little bows from the neck are all wonderfully old-fashioned -- a last glimpse back at pre-rock entertainment. His voice is still there, or was, this past Sunday at Wolf Trap. His last few, Grammy-laden recordings have mostly been tributes to figures such as Sinatra, Fred Astaire and Billie Holiday, and many of the songs he sang on Sunday were similarly dedicated. He would sing "Over the Rainbow" and then exclaim, "Judy Garland!" Also, in keeping with the fashion this year, he sang songs written by some of our centennial birthday boys, Gershwin and Ellington and Kurt Weill. Bennett has hits of his own, of course ("I was the Madonna of my day") and he did a little set of "Rags to Riches" and "I Wanna Be Around" and "I Left My Heart in San Francisco." Growing up in that town, you knew it was a major civic event when they trotted him out to do that last one, at the big party in City Hall on the eve of the 1984 Democratic convention, or when they reopened the Bay Bridge after the 1989 earthquake, or when they renamed a street after Herb Caen. So, he does good songs, mostly. His technique is conversational, singing the words as if he were saying them. On some songs, he likes to grow from a whisper into a shout, yelling out "WHEN AUTUMN LEAVES STARRRRRRT TO FALL!!!!" at the end of a tune. That part's a little annoying, but mostly he really knows how to put a song across. Still, he's never done it for me. It was pleasant sitting out under the stars and hearing these old tunes, but I generally can't listen to his records too much. He makes everything sound the same. At Wolf Trap, he was backed by Ralph Sharon, a piano player who has been with him for a hundred years, and local bass player Paul Langosh, as well as a drummer whose name slips my mind but whom Bennett assured the crowd Yogi Berra considered the best drummer since Gene Krupa. And we know how discerning Yogi Berra is about rhythm sections.

Diana Krall opened the show with repertoire that in many cases predates Bennett's. She's been marketed beautifully; I would be surprised if there were more than one or two jazz artists selling more CDs or concert tickets than her, and certainly there aren't any who have made more appearances on "Melrose Place." She's blond and has been photographed in alluring ways for her record jackets.

On top of all that she's an admirable musician. Her piano playing is fine though unspectacular (guitar player Pete Bernstein got off the most interesting licks of any musician to grace the stage that night, in clean, single-note lines) but her singing is quite nice. She never oversells a song, in contrast to Mr. Bennett, but shares his ability to pull a listener into a mood.

Her silky-husky voice is more interesting than his, and her approach is wonderfully intimate -- more so, I would imagine, in a little club than a big outdoor concert setting. (Her weeklong runs at Blues Alley here in D.C. or at Yoshi's in Oakland have tended to sell out before I bother trying for tickets). But she's no improviser. Her versions of "Peel Me a Grape" and "All or Nothing at All" are straight off the records, suggesting she's like a trained seal that learns to do a trick a certain way and sticks to it. Unlike the ingratiating Mr. Bennett, her patter is just purely dumb.