"Bravo Broadway - The Encore" contains music from the golden age of the Great White Way mixed with the Midas touch of Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber.

The Buffalo Philharmonic was led most astutely by Elizabeth Schulze, an associate conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra. The singers had resumes detailing an impressive roster of Broadway and road credits. Everything about the programming of this event is aimed at comforting, not discomfiting.

This actually works fairly well. The idea of Broadway shows becoming acceptable concert hall fodder has been gaining momentum for quite a few years now. Some opera companies have even mounted productions of shows like "West Side Story" and "Sweeney Todd" that first gained an audience with Broadway premieres. the acceptance of pop culture into the highbrow milieu is further evidenced when orchestras reach out to the community with the kind of popular programming that Arthur Fiedler helped make lucrative. On the whole it can be a good thing.

Certainly it helps when the orchestra, in this case the BPO, plays the music as well as it should be played, and the singers make the songs come alive. All three vocalists (soprano Jan Horvath, tenor Michael Maguire and baritone Doug LaBrecque) were marvelous.

Maguire acted as master of ceremonies for much of the evening and displayed the personality and award-winning technique that first made an impact in the original cast of "Les Miserables". Horvath sang with marvelous verve and intensity throughout the show while LaBrecque used his powerful voice and wide range for some of the evening's most effective singing.

The first half of the revue was filled with familiar classics from Rodgers and Hammerstein shows such as "South Pacific", "The King and I", and "Oklahoma" - the kinds of tunes that have eased their way into American cultural memory. The latter half of the evening was devoted to the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber, a composer whose gift for giving audiences a lyrical experience is as rooted in popular taste as it is in a P.T. Barnum adage.

The contrast of clever verbiage with memorable melodies in the Rodgers and Hammerstein portion of the show with the melodically challenged setting for vacuous lyrics by Webber was instructive. It showed that Webber could take the same riffs, virtually the same chords, recycle them and churn out hit show after hit show from leftovers. Still, "Memory" isn't a half-bad tune, even if heard again in its newer guise as "Music of the Night".