Philadelphia Orchestra + Pink Martini. Best enjoyed separately.

With all the election angst and the Phillies struggling toward a World Series championship Thursday night, there was really only one possible tonic: Pink Martini.

About 1,800 others agreed, turning up in Verizon Hall to hear the easy-on-the-ears retro band sampling and blending cultural influences the way the rest of us stroll the produce aisle.

Pink Martini isn’t just one sound. It contains multitudes. Thursday the percussion-heavy group referenced Afro-Cuban music and a coffee jingle from the 1970s. It landed deftly on Piaf and Barbra, replicated a little lounge music, and took a brief detour to Chopin.

There was one legendary sound that Pink Martini left out in the cold: the sound of the band with which they were sharing the stage. The violin bows and diaphragms of Philadelphia Orchestra players were moving, but the ensemble had little presence. Pink Martini’s dozen or so instrumentalists and vocalists were up front; the orchestra in back, with an acrylic sound barrier between them.

A more balanced mix at the soundboard would have helped. But the bigger imbalance was in the arrangements, which often reduced the contribution of the orchestra’s famously rich strings to a bed of sustained notes over which the flashier Martini jammed.

Is this the classical critic listening with classic bias?

Maybe not. Much of the concert hit as if the group were playing to me. I grew up in Miami, a city that grooves to a Latin beat, in a multiracial house of siblings who look a lot like the singers on Thursday’s stage. My parents were nightclub musicians. These are sounds I know and love.

Carefree as this concert seemed on one level, it was hard to not to interpret its diverse fabric as a well-timed rejoinder to today’s rising stench of racism, antisemitism, and various phobias. Pink Martini floats its message of universal love on the idea of giving listeners a good time — the audience was actually dancing in the aisles.

The group, founded in 1994 in Portland, Ore., has a rotating cast of musicians, and one of the more arresting vocalists on this night was Edna Vasquez. She took “Quizás, quizás, quizás” (“Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps”) by Osvaldo Farrés and, with her deep sound, bent the rhythms in any shape but the obvious. Devoted Martini-heads were no doubt cheered to hear founding vocalist China Forbes in a classic, “Sympathique” (“Je ne veux pas travailler,” or “I don’t want to work”), slipping on a slight Piaf affect. Forbes has tremendous presence, as did a newer singer, Jimmie Herrod, who wowed in “Exodus” in a high, pure voice.

Ari Shapiro (yes, the NPR radio personality) was most effective in a pairing with Forbes recreating the Judy Garland/Barbra Streisand musical crosshatching of “Happy Days Are Here Again” and “Get Happy.”

Pink Martini likes to drop in classical references, as it does in a song that develops out of Schubert’s Fantasia in F Minor, D. 940 for piano four hands. But maybe the classical factor is better left alone. Pink Martini has worked with 50 orchestras since 1998, and founder-pianist Thomas Lauderdale told the audience that the Philadelphia Orchestra - led here by Enrico Lopez-Yañez - was “the most amazing orchestra in the world,” before reading off the names of all the members on stage.

A more meaningful expression of regard would have been giving the orchestra the spotlight once in a while. Philadelphia has a great orchestra and anytime they appear on stage when that talent is not front and center, is a good moment to ask whether they should be there at all.