Leonard Bernstein (1918–90) is often described as having one foot in the world of symphonic music and the other in musical theater; with his legs in such vastly separated areas, I often wonder how he was able to stand up. The composer-conductor would be better remembered as having moved through both worlds at once: He brought ballet to Broadway and more than a touch of showbiz pizzazz to the classical music establishment. At the same time, Bernstein had a greater understanding of jazz than his predecessors in either field and collaborated highly credibly with Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, Benny Goodman, and others.

This year marks the 90th anniversary of Bernstein’s birth, an occasion that will be celebrated with performances all over the city. On Friday night, as part of the opening week of Lincoln Center’s 10th annual American Songbook series, the conductor and pianist most closely associated with City Center Encores!, Rob Fisher, produced and orchestrated an excellent revue of Bernsteiniana for five musicians (including himself) and two singers.

This was, in fact, the model of what a high-end songbook concert should be, especially when the coordinator of such a program is both an expert musician and a historian. Mr. Fisher re-arranged 20 Bernstein pieces into a coherent sequence, drawing primarily from the composer’s three classic Metro-centric shows — “On the Town,” “Wonderful Town,” and, to a lesser extent, “West Side Story” — and using the Allen Room’s breathtaking view of Columbus Circle as a backdrop.

The two singers, Kate Baldwin and Gavin Creel, brought to their tasks excellent voices and more than sufficient personality, but this was not a showcase for them any more than it was for the four additional musicians. Mr. Fisher orchestrated the music and kept the proceedings flowing so that the stars of the show were the Bernstein songs themselves: He consistently pepped them up by making duets out of solos, adding new sections of counterpoint, turning major into minor, and utilizing instrumental voicings that refreshed the familiar without distorting any melodies. In the end, he proved it’s possible to be clever and original within what is still essentially the Broadway musical tradition.

Prior to the performance, I wasn’t looking forward to the idea of a five-piece combo attempting Bernstein’s sumptuous ballet scores, but Mr. Fisher stressed Bernstein’s syncopated rhythms with a chamber jazz approach reminiscent of the John Kirby Sextet and the Modern Jazz Quartet, while the 6/8 “Mambo” from “West Side Story” employed timbales and other implements of Latin percussion. Through the show, drummer Erik Charleston played every rhythm instrument except conventional North American trap drums. Mr. Fisher spoke of how Bernstein’s shows depict intimate relationships within the larger framework of Manhattan “that make the city manageable”; in effect, he did the same thing with Bernstein’s ballets, bringing them down to size and personalizing them without diminishing their melodic opulence.

Mr. Fisher also threw in a few Bernstein obscurities to keep us on our toes, such as two with the composer’s own lyrics: his early “I Hate Music” and “My House,” from his unrevived, semi-musical version of “Peter Pan.” The latter was conjoined with “Make Our Garden Grow,” rarely if ever heard outside of “Candide.” The rarest was “So Pretty,” which Bernstein wrote as a protest of the Vietnam War with a lyric (surprisingly, by Betty Comden and Adolph Green) in the form of a children’s song.

Mr. Fisher set “Some Other Time” (which would have been a predictable closer, given that it’s the famous goodbye song of “On the Town”) in a cheerful major rather than the usual melancholy minor. He followed it with the hysterically perky “Wrong Note Rag,” emphasizing the jagged rhythms and zany mood with deliberately disconcerting key changes and a giddy Charleston. For an encore, Mr. Fisher returned to the stage to lead the singers through “One Hand, One Heart,” which sounded warm and even welcome, though for years I couldn’t escape it at weddings. At the end, rather than bowing to the crowd, Mr. Creel and Ms. Baldwin joined hands and turned toward the Manhattan skyline as if it were an altar — which, in the musicals of Leonard Bernstein, it is.

* * *

Bernstein would doubtless have approved of “From Here I See,” bassist and composer Ben Wolfe’s latest jazz-classical hybrid work. Mr. Wolfe’s most recent release, 2004’s “My Kinda Beautiful,” combined a jazz octet with an eight-piece string section. On Friday, as part of the Harlem in the Himalayas series at the Rubin Museum, he presented a program that fell more into line with the jazz concept of a double quartet — a format that combines a standard jazz quartet (Marcus Strickland on tenor saxophone, plus three rhythm pieces) with a standard string quartet. The performance consisted of relatively new music — five shorter pieces that have been recorded for Mr. Wolfe’s forthcoming album, “No Strangers Here” — and very new music, in the form of a new suite written expressly for Friday’s concert.

The featured work, “From Here I See,” was a 25-minute suite not only combining jazz and classical traditions but, as Mr. Wolfe explained in a spoken introduction, the conceptual influence of Asian art. He noted that he was primarily inspired by a Tibetan mask that struck him as beautiful and frightening at the same time. For this ambitious work, Mr. Wolfe offered a considerable amount of interplay between the two quartets, which began with the strings before the first melody was expressed by Mr. Wolfe himself. There were also more tempo changes, in the classical style, to separate the various sections and movements.

Where many jazz events feature improvisations that go on unchecked for as long as everybody feels like blowing, the nature of Mr. Wolfe’s tightly arranged program surprised even the composer when it ended somewhat earlier than he expected. With time to spare, Mr. Wolfe delivered a truly unplanned encore, with spontaneous blues by Mr. Strickland and the rhythm section that couldn’t quite make up its mind as to whether or not it wanted to be Thelonious Monk’s “Straight, No Chaser.” Either way was fine with me.

wfriedwald@nysun.com