Charles Petzold

By all accounts, baritone Will Liverman is currently having a career-defining run in the lead of Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones at the Metropolitan Opera. But this afternoon we got to hear him in a more intimate song recital at the Park Avenue Armory mixing more traditional fare with songs by African-American composers, but with only a small overlap with the songs on his recent CD Dreams of a New Day: Songs by Black Composers.

With the great accompanist Myra Huang, the recital in the cozy Board of Officers Room was just 70 minutes long but featured songs in four languages and a variety of styles.

Liverman began with a rousingly dramatic rendition of Goethe’s poem “Erlkönig,” but not the famous setting by Schubert but the second most famous one by Carl Loewe, with a slowdown in tempo for the quiet eerily seductive pleadings of the Elf King. Next up were three fairly early songs by Richard Strauss, one ultra-romantic, one gently caressing, and the third forlorn and resigned.

Liverman switched to French for three songs by Ravel to texts by Paul Morand based on Don Quixote and Dulcinea. I don’t think I’ve ever heard these songs before, which leads me to wonder what other songs of Ravel I’ve been missing out on all these years. These were great fun, the first incorporating Spanish dance rhythms, the second a dirge of sorts, and the third a drunken drinking song giving the pianist a workout as well. Then Liverman switched to Russian for “Sub’da,” one of the Twelve Romances of Rachmaninoff, which had the pianist quoting the fate theme of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, and the singer singing “Stuk, stuk, stuk” ("Knock, knock, knock") in different contexts, with some very Rach-ish piano towards the end..

Following not quite an intermission, the remainder of the program featured songs by African-American composers. I loved Three Dream Portraits, a 1959 work by Margaret Bonds. These three songs to poems by Langston Hughes explore different reactions to oppression. The bluesy “Minstrel Man” reveals the inner pain behind laughter and dance, “Dream Variation” is an urge to express oneself fully, while “I, Too” is a defiant proclamation of “I, too, am America.”

Next up were three of the six Nightsongs, a 1961 work by H. Leslie Adams. Set to poems by Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and James Weldon Johnson, these slow ballads incorporate pop idioms that make them surprisingly effective.

In a quite unusual move, Myra Huang left the stage, leaving the piano to Will Liverman to play and sing his own arrangement of a melding of two songs by R&B artist Brian McKnight, “One Last Cry” and “Back at One,” which fit together so well that the seam was indectable.

Ms. Huang came back to the piano for the last piece, with Will Liverman performing a particularly heartfelt rendition of the hymn “Great is They Faithfulness” in a setting by musical polymath Damien Sneed.

Here are Myra Huang and Will Liverman taking bows at the end of this too-short recital: