Bennett puts magic into music> Singer opens season at Maine Center for Arts

Tony Bennett doesn’t just sing a song; he romances it. He squeezes every silken-studded nuance of unexpected flirtation from every note and then leaves the listener feeling slightly dizzy and breathless. Few pop singers can do that in any respectable way, and there are none today who have been doing it for so long, with such pleasure and with as much continuing success as Bennett, whose Maine Center for the Arts concert Friday was the glittering highlight of the season’s opening gala evening.

At 71, Bennett’s voice may not have the same notorious sleekness it once had. But the minuscule changes that may be noticeable in timbre are easily forgotten once he adds that jazzy, snazzy, lavish personality to the delivery of the music. It could be that little salute he gives at the end of “Autumn Leaves,” or the kiss he blows after “When Joanna Loved Me,” or that cha-cha-cha during “Stepping Out.”

Certainly it has something to do with the regulation of his voice — from those guttural growls to those teasing whispers. Or it may be that slide into self-conscious jazz, the stylistic freedom, the half-talking passages, and those power crescendos that give every song a wham-bam ending. Plus when Bennett gets ahold of a song, it somehow gets transformed into a declamatory musical vignette. “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” “I Wish I Were in Love Again,” “That Old Devil Called Love,” “All of Me,” “In My Solitude,” all take on a storyteller’s lyricism when they float past his vocal chords.

Backed by his longtime pianist, the limber Ralph Sharon, Bennett began Friday’s glittering concert with “The Best Is Yet to Come” and several other classics from a 50-year repertoire of hits. Soon the old duo was joined by Sharon’s cheery head-bopping trio to perform tunes popularized by Ethel Merman, Billie Holiday, Fred Astaire, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin and Johnny Mercer.

The music-making was so refined and smooth as ensembles go that the spontaneity and cohesiveness were both sophisticated and playful — particularly with the Maine Center’s beefed-up sound system. Though each of the musicians earned a gold star for performance, Clayton Cameron on drums went over the top. In a solo segment, he became a mind-boggling blur of percussion just this side of miraculous.

Perhaps the most amazing element of Tony Bennett’s ongoing glory is the ability to look back without a smidge of nostalgia. He has the confidence and savoir-faire of a man whose career predates the rock era, but none of the stodginess or meandering sentimentality that sometime leak into performers who have been around half a century. Bennett is a crooner all right, but he’s still got the magic and, it’s worth noting, unless you’ve heard Tony Bennett sing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” and “Stranger in Paradise,” you really haven’t lived.