Will Liverman’s Survey of Black Composers

This past February American operatic baritone Will Liverman made his Cedille Records solo debut with an album whose full title is Dreams of a New Day: Songs by Black Composers. The album features three living composers, Damien Sneed, Leslie Adams, and Shawn E. Okpebholo. The twentieth-century composers are Harry Burleigh, Margaret Bonds, Thomas Kerr, and Robert Owens. There is also an “encore selection” in the form of Liverman’s own arrangement of Richard Fariña’s song “Birmingham Sunday.” His accompanist for all of these selections is pianist Paul Sánchez.

Opera News praised Liverman for his “unique combination of eloquence and unpretentiousness.” Given what we frequently encounter on the opera stage, that is praise indeed! One encounters that same combination on this debut album. Nevertheless, with the exception of that “encore” and Okpebholo’s “Ballad of Birmingham,” both reflecting on the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, by members of the Ku Klux Klan on September 15, 1963, a major turning-point in the Civil Rights movement, Liverman’s eloquence tends to be on the bland side.

This emerges through a sameness in delivery, which may not be entirely Liverman’s fault. Rather, the texts themselves have a tendency to be more than a little too prosaic. As a result, Liverman’s approach to interpretation tends to avoid sharp edges, probably because the edges of his texts were not that sharp in the first place. Mind you, in September of 1963 I was (in the words of Shel Silverstein) “young and white and Jewish” and was just beginning my freshman year; so I was paying more attention to my homework assignments than to the Civil Rights movement. This would make me a poor judge of both the denotations and the connotations of the texts that Liverman had chosen to sing, meaning that I am in a poor position to assess the rhetorical stances he brings to each of the tracks on this recording.

More significantly, now that COVID restrictions are beginning to loosen, I would welcome any opportunity to listen to Liverman’s performance as a recitalist (or, for that matter, on the opera stage).