Baritone Will Liverman describes his album Dreams of a New Day as a passion project, which indeed it may be, but that description undersells his accomplishment. This album is a collection of art songs by African American composers, a field where it is often the same few pieces that get performed. Liverman does sing the Three Dream Portraits of Margaret Bonds, setting texts by Langston Hughes, and these have shown up fairly often on programs by Black artists. However, much of the rest of the program is revelatory, tracing ...
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Baritone Will Liverman describes his album Dreams of a New Day as a passion project, which indeed it may be, but that description undersells his accomplishment. This album is a collection of art songs by African American composers, a field where it is often the same few pieces that get performed. Liverman does sing the Three Dream Portraits of Margaret Bonds, setting texts by Langston Hughes, and these have shown up fairly often on programs by Black artists. However, much of the rest of the program is revelatory, tracing the interchange between African American composition and poetry. Composer Robert Owens, who spent most of his career in Germany, also draws on Hughes, while Thomas Kerr's Riding to Town sets a poem by the highly music-ready Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and one of the two new songs by Shawn E. Okpebholo, marking the impact of terrorist attacks in Birmingham and Charleston on African American life, uses a text by Dudley Randall. Liverman's performance of five songs by Harry T. Burleigh is...
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