“I REALLY love doing concerts with the beautiful CSO,” though “it can be pretty scary with a whole lot of players behind you,” says the glamorous soprano Trisha Crowe.

“I try to be the icing on the cake,” she says.

Classically-trained, with a vocal range reminiscent of Sarah Brightman, Crowe will star in a slap-up gala in Llewellyn Hall, where she’ll perform numbers by George and Ira Gershwin, with the CSO and pianist Piers Lane.

Although Crowe has performed in shows such as “Oliver” and “Eureka!”, she believes that “as a concert artist, you get to explore different music”, praising the “classical basis with lots of jazz” that forms the basis of the gala.

She says that singing with CSO is sheer pleasure and Gershwin is “a new area of music” for her, so she’s been slaving for six months to learn the relatively unfamiliar songs.

Speaking by phone from Singapore where she’d entertained guests at the birthday party of a local shipping tycoon, Crowe says she’s impressed that the CSO’s director Nicholas Milton has revamped the orchestra for the night by adding a “big band” style sax section.

She’s counting off on her song list… “Summertime”, “The Man I Love”, “A Foggy Day “, “I Got Rhythm”, “‘S Wonderful” and a delicious version of “Someone to Watch Over Me” in French.

The last time we’d spoken, she’d just sung a staggering 12 songs for CSO’s 2011 “Symphony in the Park” and was about to open in the “The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber” at Melbourne’s Regent Theatre.

She volunteers some unprompted opinions about the ANU School of Music crisis. “I signed the petition,” she tells me, “Canberra’s music school has had such a reputation.”

ACTEW Grand Gala, “An Evening with George Gershwin”, Llewellyn Hall, Saturday, July 7.