Baritone Will Liverman is the opera equivalent of what theater people dub a triple threat aka someone who can do it all. Liverman is a pianist, a composer and one of the most versatile baritones on opera and concert stages around the globe.
Liverman starred in Anthony Davis’s opera ‘X: The Life and times of Malcolm X’ and Terrence Blanchard’s ‘Fire Shut Up in My Bones’ both at the Metropolitan Opera and taking on classic roles like Mecurcio in Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette and Papageno in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. In 2023 he starred in the premiere ‘The Factotum’ at Lyric Opera of Chicago, a production he co-composed.
Lexicon Classics has just released ‘The Dunbar/Moore Sessions, with Liverman as composer-pianist, leading a stellar line-up of opera singers and musicians in his song cycle set to verse by African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson. Liverman writes in the liner notes that their poems … helped me find mine… I’m not writing “in” any genre but rather drawing from the full spectrum of sounds and traditions that have shaped me—classical, musical theater, gospel, jazz, and more.”
Among the many highlights
The evocative opening track with Liverman illuminating Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem ‘Morning’ with ‘My soul is swift upon the wing/And in its depth a song I bring’ draws you in and states the evocative themes of this song cycle. Later in the song cycle, he also solos with a bare bones minimalist pianism on ‘Life’s Tragedy’ pondering Paul Dunbar’s spiritual conundrums.
On ‘A Golden Day,’ Liverman’s piano lines float around soprano Lauren Snouffer valiant take on love lost. ‘I found you and I lost you/I found you and I lost you, All on a golden day, But when I dream of you, dear, It is always brimming May.’
The composer joins tenor Martin Luther Clark’s harmonizing brotherly duet ‘The Lesson, with the soulful lines ‘the sound of my voice and lyre/ Though mind was a feeble art// So I sang a lay for a brother’s ear In a strain to soothe his bleeding heart/ Though mine was a feeble art. But at his smile I smiled in turn, And into my soul there came a ray: In trying to soothe another’s woes Mine own had passed away.
Soprano Lauren Snouffer’s airy soprano and blue vibrato illustrate ‘A Prayer’ in all of its profound simplicity.
In Dunbar’s Sonnet with the yearning lines “And now—unwittingly, you’ve made me dream of violets, and my soul’s forgotten gleam” A dialogue between Liverman’s full basso-bari and the disquieted pianism and the tender strings of Lady Jess’s violin.
The adagio tempo of ‘Night’ is an atmosphere of solitude so movingly conjured by Mykal Kilgore’s tenor-alto and altogether seamless passagio.
“A Threefold Heart” is a three-part song cycle. It opens with “Love and the Butterfly ,” Joshua Blue’s expressive tenor describing a butterfly’s flight on Liverman’s journeying piano. Isobel Leonard brings haunting drama to Liverman’s arch piano on ‘If I Had Known. Lindsay Sharpe’s distant harp breezes through Liverman piano and lush vocal for ‘A Love Song.’
Erin Morley’s glimmering soprano evokes the complex emotions of ‘Farewell’ accompanied by Liverman’s adagio jazz piano. For Alice Dunbar’s ‘Emancipation,’ Liverman’s voice and gospel piano variations takes the music faithful, and music heathen to church. In ‘The Pliant’ soprano Jacqueline Echols is both steely and subtle and altogether lives in Alice Dunbar’s confessional of a broken heart.
Baritone Adam Richardson plays on the folkloric vocabulary of Dunbar’s ‘To the Negro Farmers of the US’ a transcendent poem and a manifesto of perseverance and hope in an unjust society. The balance that Liverman achieves in setting these dramatic narrative poems is transcendent in its literary, musical and civic agency. Art as witness, needed now more than ever.
