Celine Dion in full force at HP Pavilion

Celine Dion makes faces when she sings.

She crinkles up her nose. She arches her eyebrows. She winks and darts quick little smiles after she ends a line. Her face is such a studied mask of projected emotion, she sometimes inadvertently looks like someone experiencing intense pain - all relayed in pinpoint detail, splashed 20 feet tall on the giant video screen above the stage.

More than a year after the pricey tickets first went on sale, three months after she postponed the original date at the last moment under doctor's orders, the long-legged lung-buster from Quebec finally made her way back to the Bay Area on Friday for her first concert in 10 years at the HP Pavilion in San Jose.

From a stage in the center of the arena floor, underneath not one, but two video superstructures, with hydraulic lifts and people-mover conveyor belts reconfiguring the stage for every number, Dion poured it on. You want cheese? She is a Velveeta volcano.

In a little wisp of a white dress, flecked with gold and sequins, teetering atop impossible heels, she scaled the ramps extending her stage practically into the side sections to reach the dramatic final crescendo of "The Power of Love" right in the faces of the audience - and the close-up video for the other seven-eighths of the crowd. She hit the big note, held it, brought it to a breathless ending and waved her fist in a little athletic flourish, as if to say, "There, I did it."

For almost two hours, she held the capacity crowd in her considerable sway with a dazzling series of costume changes, bold, high-tech staging and her own indefatigable life force. Dion has an almost unnaturally loud voice and she uses - some might say over-uses - its power on everything she sings. As with the little eye and cheek comments, she doesn't work with nuance. She has a vibrato wide enough to drive a truck through, and she can slam a song to a close like a sledgehammer.

She is more suited to the bogus bombast of Jim Steinman's "It's All Coming Back to Me Now" because the "Bat Out of Hell" mastermind deals in cartoonish landscapes. Her climactic version of "River Deep - Mountain High," the Phil Spector masterpiece done by Tina Turner didn't quite work as well, as the song is rooted in a rhythm and blues vocal style. As Dion demonstrated aptly with her James Brown medley, the girl doesn't have an ounce of funk in her.

With Dion, what matters is a connection to her audience through a combination of style, presence and her musical abilities, plus the sense to her largely female following that, despite all the glamour on the surface, deep down she is one of them. She knows the pain of being a woman; she knows the joys. Her songs could be about anyone's lives; it takes Celine to bring them to life, fill them with stardust and enhance their inspirational qualities through her own unique gifts.

"Put yourself in my shoes," she says, "and ladies, you know I have a lot of shoes."

Dion is a singing Barbie doll come to life, all wardrobe, hair and makeup, surrounded by a gang of boy and girl dancers.

She stayed close to her hits, offered a couple of selections from her 2007 album, "Taking Chances," but nobody comes to a Celine Dion concert to hear her sing Gershwin. She did sing a video duet with Italian opera star Andrea Bocelli - her on the stage, him on the lower video screens and the two of them joined on the larger video screens above.

She waited to close with her "Titanic" hit, "My Heart Will Go On," reappearing for her second encore in a floor-length black gown, as banks of candles were lowered from the rafters. Even though in the end she is serving relentlessly middle-brow aesthetics, an artistic vision as powerful as hers sweeps up everything in its path. Celine Dion cannot be denied.

E-mail Joel Selvin at jselvin@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle