Appealing, if not quite solid, Bernstein tribute

often feel so inconsequential? In part it was because the program was a selection of bonbons — attractive numbers pulled out of their dramatic context and strung together like beads on a necklace.

More to the point was the evidence that the recital as a whole was not quite ready for prime time. Leonard sang the entire program from the score, and although there were no obvious glitches, there was also no mistaking which selections she did and did not have solidly under her belt.

At her best — which is to say, in the selections she knew backward and forward — Leonard crafted interpretations full of personality and verve. She sang “A Little Bit in Love” from “Wonderful Town” with an ingratiating, easy lilt (then repeated it as an encore, which was a bit perplexing), and embellished “Some Other Time” from “On the Town”) with a series of perfectly placed musical sighs.

She brought wit and an aptly cinematic zest to “What a Movie,” the uproarious comicallyrical centerpiece from “Trouble in Tahiti,” and she sang “There Is a Garden,” the air of tender longing from the same work, with such raw emotional power and tonal splendor that she herself seemed moved (it caught her, she said from the stage afterward, by surprise). “To What You Said,” the Whitman setting from “Songfest,” found Bernstein at his least pop-tinged, and Leonard at her most ambitious and eloquent.

But to sing “Something’s Coming” from “West Side Story” with eyes fixed on a music stand, as Leonard did, is to foreclose any chance of catching the music’s rhythmic urgency and sense of abandon. There were other selections, too — from “West Side Story,” from “Candide,” from “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue” — that seemed to be a fair bit of woodshedding away from actual mastery.

One of the evening’s pleasant surprises was “My Twelve Tone Melody,” a clever bauble that Bernstein wrote to celebrate Irving Berlin’s 100th birthday (the dedicatee went on to outlive his own centennial by more than a year). Selfdescribed in Bernstein’s lyrics as a “nasty little waltz,” it winningly channels Schoenberg’s compositional system, through bravado and charm, back into a traditional tonality. Leonard and Arida gave it a knowing, dark and fittingly celebratory rendition.

At her best — which is to say, in the selections she knew backward and forward — mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard crafted interpretations full of personality and verve.