It’s hard to imagine Bruce Springsteen dressing up as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, or the rapper Kanye West singing Zing Went the Strings of My Heart. Michael Bublé’s dulcet voice is rarely heard discussing gay rights, and the hip-hop producer Timbaland tends not to bring his mother on stage for a duet of Somewhere over the Rainbow. So it’s funny to see all four artists sharing this week’s nomination for Best International Male at the Brit Awards with Rufus Wainwright, who has done all of the above and more in homage to Judy Garland.

“Only in England could Kanye West be sandwiched between Bruce Springsteen and me in the same category,” Wainwright giggles down a phone line on his way to Tokyo for his world tour.

Of course, Wainwright, 34, has released five albums of his own critically acclaimed music, but his biggest project to date, and what no doubt got him nominated, is his recreation of Garland’s legendary 1961 Carnegie Hall concert, which is released on CD on Monday.

“I didn’t want to mimic her but I do try and summon her a little bit. I imagine myself with pigtails and the gingham skirt, or with the Meet Me in St Louishat on, grabbing the guy’s sleeve on the trolley. When I was a little kid my favourite outfit was this little apron that I used to dance around in, pretending to be Dorothy, with a little lamb called Toto. I was like, ‘Let’s go to Oz!’ ” The more serious side of Garland’s songs hit him only in the aftermath of September 11, though, when Wainwright, who grew up in Canada, was living in New York. He watched America turn from victim into aggressor, “and destroy everything in its path. It was such a tragedy to watch that shift. Not that I was expecting America to roll over and take it – but I do feel that it could have been so different, so much wiser.”

And then, one day, he put on the Judy Garland album of songs from that show. “I was instantly reminded of how fabulous America can be; of how much hope it has imbued throughout the world. And also how sophisticated the record was, whether it’s the songs, the arrangements or the set list, going from a big-band number to this little piano song. So that record was where I kept my secret love of America, in that safe little treasure chest with a little American flag, waving, amid this big angry Canadian polar bear. And I realised that I had to spread the word.”

And so he began the mammoth task of recreating her show, with full orchestra, in London, Paris, Carnegie Hall in New York and Los Angeles. I met up with Wainwright at his LA performance last year, chosen as the finale because he wanted to “put [Garland] to rest where she was her most beautiful and effervescent”. The glamorous audience brought picnics and champagne to watch Wainwright stand on his rainbow-shaped stage. After struggling with the demands of San Francisco, he conquered his voice with a truly spellbinding rendition of In London Town.

His family – mother Kate McGarrigle and sister Martha – and Garland’s daughter Lorna Luft all made dazzling appearances too, and Luft later told me that Wainwright had brought her mother’s music to a whole new audience. Yet her half-sister, Liza Minnelli, didn’t want anything to do with the show.

“Liza is very dubious of anything regarding her mother,” Wainwright explains. “I think she spent so much energy defining herself, and successfully so, that she can’t really afford to go there. But she’ll come around, I think, once the record comes out and it’s very successful – and I can pay for dinner, ha-ha.”

There was also opposition from Wainwright’s own family initially – his father (the folk singer Loudon Wainwright III) and mother were both concerned that the project might be professional suicide.

“Their knee-jerk reaction was that I would marginalise myself and be regarded as this gay anomaly. In the Fifties and Sixties, if you were a Judy Garland fan you were a homosexual and you were also doomed and tragic. Judy was a refuge from the straight world, but also a bit of a trap. But that was really on the heels of one of the most profound civil rights shifts in the history of the world, Stonewall, when homosexuals said: ‘We’re here, we’re queer and we need freedom’.

“Then once I started singing the songs, there was this obvious . . .” he affects a self-mocking luvvie voice, “as Jeremy Irons said after seeing the show, ‘a strange kind of relationship to the material’ that occurs when I sing it. I can’t quite believe how well it’s all worked out.” The Brit Awards will be televised live on ITV 1 on Feb 20 at 8pm.

— Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall (Polydor) is out on Monday

Explore Music

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

• Classical

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010