It was a new-look, old-time-sound Alison Krauss & Union Station that brought their Arcadia tour to Columbus, Ohio’s, Mershon Auditorium. 

Just three dates in to their new beginning with Russell Moore (guitar, mandolin, co-lead vocals) and Stuart Duncan (fiddle, mandolin, guitar and backgrounds), Krauss, Dobro master Jerry Douglas, banjoist/guitarist Ron Block and bassist Barry Bales are already well-oiled, with each of the six singers and players dialed in to their lead and support roles and working together for the greater good. 

They wrapped the 33-song, 110-minute Easter-eve performance with a six-song encore of “When You Say Nothing at All,” “Whiskey Lullaby,” “Down to the River to Pray,” “A Living Prayer,” “When He Reached Down his Hand for Me” and “There is a Reason.” Built like an opening sequence, it found AKUS slowly expanding from the trio of Krauss, Block and Moore to the full group, all gathered around a single mic for a spiritual end to a celebratory evening of bluegrass music. 

“We’ve been doing a lot of practicing but it’s still scary,” Krauss had said earlier, after the band ripped through the instrumental “Choctaw Hayride.” And despite a few monitor issues and a pedal problem that threatened – and failed – to derail Douglas’ solo-instrumental performance of Paul Simon’s “American Tune” segued into Return to Forever’s “Spain,” the practice made practically perfect. 

Moore was the ideal stand-in for the decamped Dan Tyminski, ably singing the former’s “The Boy Who Wouldn’t Hoe Corn” and marking his Union Station territory with such Arcadia tracks as the swinging “North Side Gal” and the brooding “Hangman.”

But the audience was there mostly to hear Krauss, her fiddle and her angelic voice. And she delivered on numbers like “Ghost in this House,” “Baby, Now that I’ve Found You,” “Let Me Touch You for a While” and “Paper Airplane.” And though some of the selections were trimmed to fit into the confines of this show, the Arcadia tour is sure to wind up a fan favorite as it only tightens up and loosens up as it unfolds across North America and runs into September. 

Despite his placement on the back line next to Bales, Duncan was an explosive, fully integrated sideman, his fiddle and mandolin solos receiving some of the most-raucous applause from the sold-out house that took in the band on a visually appealing stage set that placed the titular Arcadia inside Mershon via a 3-D marquee, ticket booth and street lamp situated before a screen that carried various outdoor scenes to illustrate individual songs. 

The evening’s biggest surprise came in the form of “Angel Flying too Close to the Ground,” which began with Douglas and Krauss alone before the band melted in – a glorious arrangement that nodded to the new era of Union Station. 

Nodding to the old, Krauss remained angelic of singing voice and hilarious of speaking voice, whether good-naturedly ribbing Block for his formerly vegetarian ways or teasing Bales, an avid hunter, for dressing in “secret clothes” and “murdering god’s creatures.”