Sarit Hadad, backed by a symphony

After 15 years in the business, Sarit Hadad is still an innovator.

Backed Friday by the Israel Symphony Orchestra Rishon Lezion — which included a viola, cello, and piano rather than her typical Middle Eastern darbuka drum and a guitar outfit — Hadad performed as part of Rishon Lezion’s spring festival.

Merging Eastern and Western music traditions, Hadad invoked one of Middle Eastern music’s finest singers, Egypt’s Umm Kulthum, whose stage performances regularly included a 50-piece symphony.

Not everyone was happy with the singer’s fresh approach. Israel Army radio reported that some of the fans who attended the performance had not expected “an opera” and were disappointed not to see a more traditional concert by Hadad.

Hadad, a recent judge on the reality-TV show “The Voice,” is known as a pop star with a diverse range who often infuses her music with a cross-cultural flair. She plays the piano, guitar, accordian, and the darbuka and is widely considered one of Israel’s best Mizrahi-genre (“Middle Eastern”) female singers.

She sings in several languages, including Turkish, Arabic, French, Greek, Georgian, Bulgarian.