High-Led Fuel for Page, Plant at Irvine Meadows : Pop music review: With grace and power, the pair resurrect the Zeppelin sound for longtime fans and those who missed it the first time around.

IRVINE —  History can be a hard thing to shake for the aging rock star. All those questions about age, ability and relevance from a new generation of listeners.

So who could have expected that the music of Jimmy Page and Robert Plant would age far better than anyone imagined when Led Zeppelin fell apart at the height of the punk rebellion 15 years ago?

Now that the rock of the ‘80s has proven to have included as much drek as the once-reviled ‘70s, the old excesses of Zeppelin don’t seem quite so indulgent.

That legacy was running at full bore Monday in the first of two nights at Irvine Meadows, where the reunited Page and Plant resurrected the Zeppelin sound for a crowd of longtime fans and others who missed it the first time around.

Not that the duo’s performance carried anything urgent--just an impeccable gracefulness and power. It was essentially Zeppelin reborn, though without the late drummer John Bonham or bassist John Paul Jones.

But there was no avoiding the ghost of Zeppelin on Monday, particularly since only one of the three new songs that appear on the recent “No Quarter: Page and Plant Unledded” album was performed at all. It was golden oldies the rest of the night, but with an emphasis on integrating new rhythmic elements provided by a group of Egyptian percussionists and string players.

Along with another 20-piece string section, these sidemen played to the bandleaders’ continuing taste for the epic, the Mideastern and the medieval. Many of them had played on “No Quarter,” as part of what Plant on Monday called their “endeavor to bring you more shades and more colors.”

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Page’s fretwork and timing were as sharp as ever, creating music infinitely more compelling and expressive than what emerged from that generation of Eddie Van Halen clones who followed him through the ‘80s.

As Page demonstrated again and again at Irvine, Zeppelin was never the champion of thick-headed metal. Songs such as “Kashmir” transcended that genre with intelligence and finesse, even as they helped create it. Still master of the slow burn, Page wrestled through expressive moments of heavy blues in one solo after another.

Plant was in good voice, even if avoiding the highest notes of the old Zeppelin repertoire. The singer nonetheless retains the searing cosmic whine that was unmatched as rock’s most acquired taste before the arrival of Perry Farrell via Jane’s Addiction.

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The two-hour concert was guided by the two bandleaders with few rock star turns. Unlike their various solo tours, there was no giant movie screen displaying heroic images of Plant on horseback galloping through the desert, no Page shuffling down a laser-light tunnel.

Special effects gave way to a confidence in the music itself. What remains now is for the duo to resurrect the inventiveness of their youth and write new music to match their early work.

That’s when the brash experiments of Zeppelin were met with howls of protest from such blues purists as John Mayall. Reworking the old tunes with new instrumentation is a fine and honorable route back to the stage, but without fresh, meaningful material, Page and Plant could easily just become the new Frank and Sammy.