Dianna Krall jazzes up Ra’anana, leaving politics aside.

It takes a singular talent for a singer to perform outdoors in Ra’anana on a sweaty, muggy evening and make the audience feel as if they were in an air conditioned club, listening to cool jazz amid the tinkle of ice cubes in a glass.

It also takes a singular talent for the wife of Elvis Costello, the singer who dissed the country a few months back by refusing to perform here on ‘political grounds,’ to come and play in such a way that people no longer wished a pox on the Costello house, simply because she lives in that house.

Color me provincial, but I would have been bowled over had she stepped on stage in that black, sleeveless dress of hers and mangled some innocuous Hebrew phrase, or said, “Hello Israel,” or something at all to acknowledge that she was playing here, in Israel, and not in Belgrade, or Bucharest, or Beirut, where she was the night before.