By Robert Nesti

When Storm Large takes the Symphony Hall stage on May 23 with Pink Martini to perform with the Boston Pops, those with long memories may recall her 2021 appearance on the reality show America’s Got Talent. She first had to tell the judges: yes, Storm Large is her real name, and she was 51 years old. They were understandably shocked — the stunning Large looks decades younger. She then turned heads with her choice of audition song, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” “When you said the name of the song, I was going to call my mother,” judge Howie Mandel said afterward. But once Storm began singing, any hint of a typically haughty cabaret delivery or Sinatra cool vanished. With haunting phrasing and piercing musicality, she gave the Cole Porter standard a deep, psychological reading — something was under her skin and it couldn’t be dismissed. By the end of the song, the judges were on their feet.

Such a response isn’t unusual for Storm Large, whose 30-year music career stretches back to various rock bands in San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, where she lives, and as a semi-regular member of that city’s celebrated musical group, Pink Martini. Anyone who has seen Storm Large perform with Pink Martini knows what to expect: outrageous fun and superb musicianship. Saturday night will be no exception. Joining Large and the band for vocals is “America’s Got Talent” finalist Jimmie Herrod. (For ticket availability, click here.)

Pink Martini began performing in 1994 out of political necessity. Thomas Lauderdale, a queer activist and musician, was tired of the lackluster bands who played at fundraisers, specifically to oppose a ballot measure that would have declared homosexuality illegal in Oregon. “So if it wasn’t for the anti-gay-rights initiative in Oregon in 1994,” he has said, “the band would not exist.”

Pink Martini became the house band at political fundraisers in Portland, restricting themselves to appearing only in the city over their first five years. Lauderdale met singer China Forbes at Harvard and recruited her as the band’s lead singer in 1995. Together they shaped what Lauderdale calls “a little orchestra” — a dozen or so musicians, a few singers, and frequent guests — blending world music and cabaret, show tunes and rock and roll. They are flexible enough to play solo gigs or with large symphony orchestras, as they will on Saturday night. Their diversity is astounding: a Hollywood standard one minute, a French chanson the next, followed by samba from Brazil or a song from Iran. And it is not pastiche — not music in the style of its origins — but the real thing: authentic arrangements heard as they were meant to be.

How Storm Large became a member of the group is a classic show business story. “I had been friends with Thomas and China since I moved to town,” she explained from her home in Portland. “And we did a lot of political fundraising and nonprofit work together.” In April 2011, Pink Martini was headed to Washington for four sold-out concerts at the Kennedy Center when a crisis occurred: China Forbes required emergency vocal cord surgery and would be unavailable. Lauderdale turned to Large. “You’re the only person I can think of who can do this,” he told her. Large demurred: she didn’t know a single Pink Martini song. Forbes intervened by email, asking her to do it as a favor. Storm relented.

“I had to learn 10 songs in five languages in four days, and they let me have a cheat sheet on stage. My first shows were four sold-out concerts at the Kennedy Center. But I don’t remember it, because I was in a bald-faced panic the whole time.” From all reports, she was a revelation, and saved the band from canceling a very lucrative engagement. “What’s funny is that I owned all their records, but barely remember listening to them.” Since then she has become a permanent fixture with the band — touring alongside Forbes, and appearing on the group’s recordings. Though they have radically different musical personalities — Forbes is understated and intimate, Large theatrical and physically commanding — they are, by all accounts, formidable together.

Over the years, Large has made her niche with the band, with breakthrough performances of such songs as “Până când nu te iubeam,” the haunting Romanian song she considers one of her favorites; “And Then You’re Gone,” a tango-inspired breakup anthem that showcases her Valkyrie-meets-cabaret vocal power; and, most recently, “Bella Ciao,” the band’s version of the Italian anti-fascist anthem that she delivers with vulnerability and defiance.

“It was such a banger, and strangely very appropriate for the times,” she says. “It originally comes from Italian female workers seeking better pay and better treatment, then was adopted as an anti-fascist anthem. With the rise of authoritarianism all over the world, it’s a great release. When we sing it in Europe, everyone sings along.

“I believe there are more of us who believe in liberal democracy than there are people who want to control everybody and everything. And when we all sing that together, it’s a reminder that you’re not alone.”

Large’s first appearance with a symphony orchestra was with her own band in Portland, and she was immediately seduced by the richness of the experience. “I felt like I was on the moon, surfing on the back of a unicorn,” she says. “It’s magic. It really is magic.”

But performing with major orchestras also makes her anxious. “It’s important for me to do the very best job I can do, especially if I’m with a symphony or with Pink Martini, because I’m representing them. I really want to always be worthy of the spot I’m taking up on stage with these awesome people. So I get anxious around that.”

What has defined her career is an ability to accept challenges and push through her anxieties — though it is never easy. Her Carnegie Hall debut in 2013, singing Kurt Weill’s daunting The Seven Deadly Sins in German with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, required literal intervention. “My two best friends had to drag me through the stage door,” she recalls. “It was my own panicky insecurity.” She need not have worried. The New York Times called her “sensational.”

She is presently considering another challenge: playing the lead in the musical Next to Normal, which depicts the emotional collapse of a suburban woman after the death of her son and her troubled relationship with pharmaceuticals. It strikes very close to home for Large, whose mother was institutionalized when she was very young.

“I had to run out of the theater when I saw it in New York because it was just too on the nose with my mother. I had a panic attack — it was the electroshock therapy scene. I just couldn’t get out of there fast enough. But the musical is so good. I see it as a full circle moment of healing.”

That will have to wait until she completes her latest solo theatrical venture, Storm Large Makes It Home, which opens at Portland Center Stage on June 12. It is a sequel of sorts to Crazy Enough, her autobiographical musical that played an unprecedented 21 weeks at the theater in 2009 — the longest run in its history. Three years later she turned the material into a critically acclaimed book chronicling her mother’s mental illness and her own feelings of being an outcast.

“This show is more about my father,” she says, “and about growing up as a weird, artistic person in the very straight-laced universe of St. Mark’s School, where he taught for 45 years. It’s basically about how you find where you belong when you pretty much feel like you don’t belong anywhere.”

The world of St. Mark’s was a difficult fit for Storm, who was rambunctious and outgoing. It is one of the oldest Episcopal boarding schools in America, modeled on British public schools, set on 250 acres, with a student body that has historically included Ben Bradlee, Franklin Delano Roosevelt III, and Prince Hashim of Jordan. Her father — an ex-Marine who taught history and coached football — was hardly receptive to his daughter’s creative ambitions.

“I knew I could sing when I was really young, but I was always told to shut up,” she recalled. “Seeking attention meant you were a bad person. I knew I could sing, but I was not encouraged to.”

“I was so different from my brothers and my dad that I was kind of shunned and made to feel like something was wrong with me. People would hear me sing and they’d be like, ‘Wow!’ And then they’d say something to my dad, and he’d be like, ‘Yeah, she just wants attention.’ It was something that I loved, that I was good at, but it pushed away the thing I really wanted — my dad’s approval. I wanted to be loved and accepted. I finally got away from that environment, and I did find love and acceptance and a home in the weird music family.”

But the larger music industry couldn’t pigeonhole her talent. The mix of rock singer, cabaret comedian, storyteller, and big personality performer resisted every category they needed to sell her. She was told repeatedly she would be more successful if only she were less herself.

“I was told over and over again that I would be so successful if only I was not who I was,” she says. “I’m all over the place. But it’s been fun.” So she became what the business calls plug and play: the singer you call when Michael Bolton is sick and the New York Pops needs someone who can learn his repertoire overnight; the voice Lauderdale reached for when Forbes lost hers and four sold-out Kennedy Center dates were on the line. Enormously useful. Harder to package.

The glamorous figure audiences encounter today is, she explains, essentially drag. “I put on my glam drag and do my glam thing — I’m presenting very feminine, very glamorous,” she says. “And it’s really fun, because old-school fans look at me and go, ‘I know you’re a dirty bastard, what are you doing with shoes on?’”

The original tension, it turns out, ran in the opposite direction from what you might expect. It wasn’t that her rawness was too much for polite company. It was that her voice was too pretty for punk rock. “I could scream and yell and sing dirty lyrics,” she says, “but when I would sing with a pretty voice, they said, ‘your voice is too pretty for this.’ And I was like: too bad. This is who I am.”

And she already has ideas for a third show. “I want to do something about what it’s really like to be a musician — the hustle, the industry, being independent, some of the hilarious things that happen on tour. How you can actually be successful doing this. What the life really looks like.”

She has made her peace with all of it — perhaps because the hustle was never foreign to her. Rock and roll teaches you to scrap. The industry’s confusion about what she is feels, at this point in a career that has taken her from Portland dive bars to symphony stages on six continents, less like a limitation than a description of exactly what makes her worth watching.

Storm Large performs with Pink Martini, along with vocalist Jimmie Herrod with the Boston Pops conducted by Keith Lockhart. The concert takes place on Saturday, May 23 at 7:30 pm at Boston’s Symphony Hall, 301 Massachusetts Avenue, Boston, MA. For more information, follow this link.