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For the final concerts of his Canadian tour, singer and pianist Michel Legrand had to make a few adjustments. It wasn't a matter of changing the songs – “In any concert I do, I play only my music and nothing else,” he said in a phone interview a few days before Friday's performance in Toronto – so much as changing the language.

The earlier dates had all been in Quebec, where he could expect a solidly francophone crowd; at the Winter Garden Theatre, he sang La Valse des Lilas as Once Upon a Summertime , using Johnny Mercer's English lyrics instead of Eddy Marnay's original French. Likewise, when he closed the show in duet with Quebecker Mario Pelchat, it was with The Windmills of Your Mind, not Les Moulins de Mon Coeur .

For Legrand, who has worked widely in Hollywood and enjoys a long working relationship with lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman, the shift to English was de rien . But he was very excited for Pelchat. “For the first time, he's going to sing a few of my songs in English, so it's a big premiere for him,” he said. “I'm very pleased with that.”

Pelchat, whose big voice carries the jazzy sizzle of a young Johnny Mathis, took the shift in stride, handling The Summer Knows (from 1971's Summer of '42 ) as if he'd been singing it in English all his life. I Will Wait for You (from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg ) was a bilingual tour de force, sassy and swinging for the English verses, then full of anguish when Pelchat shifted to French for the final refrain of “Oh! Je t'aime/ Ne me quitte pas.”

Shifting from jazz to chanson in a single tune is no big deal for Legrand, whose work has always been inclined to absorb disparate styles. It can be tempting to dismiss some of that flexibility as mere dramatic expedience – for instance, adding a Yiddish folk flavour to some melodies in his score for the Barbra Streisand film Yentl – but the truth is that Legrand's best songs are remarkably versatile, and can be shaped to fit almost any style.

He made that point quite deftly in a suite of tunes from Yentl which became a sort of chamber music showcase for his wife, harp virtuoso Catherine Michel. He did it another way a bit later in the show, when he recounted a dream in which various jazz greats played versions of his hit Watch What Happens . Legrand didn't just drop names, though – he offered dead-on piano impressions of such legends as Art Tatum, George Shearing, Dave Brubeck and Oscar Peterson.

Peterson was a particularly strong presence in the show, and not because the great pianist's widow was in the crowd that night. “Toronto to me is the holy place, because I did so many concerts with Oscar Peterson, who I loved so much,” he said earlier that week. “He was to me the most extraordinary jazz pianist in the world, and then when he asked me to come and work with him, I mean I was crying on the plane.

“I wrote orchestrations and arrangements for him, and I conducted the orchestra on the last concert we did together … He and I, walking on the stage arm-in-arm – I will never forget that image. It was extraordinary.”

Perhaps because of that memory, the jazz content was kept very high on Friday. Working with a three-piece rhythm section, Legrand made it clear that even if he hadn't written so many classic tunes, he'd still be in demand as an improvising pianist. Not only did his playing run the gamut from the classically-inflected Family Fugue to the down-home grit of Ray Blues , but his solos were, as always, wonderfully inventive and elegantly rendered. At 77, he remains as charming and unstoppable as ever.