Judged on artistic terms alone, Stephen Powell’s interpretations make for a deeply satisfying solo debut recital album. His achievement is all the more extraordinary for resonating so compellingly with our historical moment. The American baritone, who comes to this project after decades of experience as an opera performer, has put together a thoughtfully chosen, deeply felt programme of contemporary vocal writing by four of his compatriots. Recorded shortly before the coronavirus pandemic brought live performances to a halt – and provided a lingering, mass-casualty coda to the Trump administration – ‘American Composers at Play’ challenges the myth of a unifying ‘American sound’.

The composers in question are Lori Laitman, Ricky Ian Gordon, John Musto and William Bolcom, each the creator of a distinctive and prolific output of works for the voice. Powell has chosen a generous and engaging mixture of opera arias, short song-cycles and individual art songs (including excerpts from Bolcom’s signature cabaret songs) that span the careers of these seasoned composers; six of the 29 tracks are premiere recordings. The title, moreover, is a play on words: each composer appears on the album accompanying Powell at the keyboard in his or her songs, adding a note of interpretative authenticity to the proceedings. Adding to the tonal variety, some of the items call for different instrumentation (solo cello, clarinet, guitar and string quartet).

It is no salute to flag-waving nationalism that all of the composers and performers, as well as the poets whose words are set, are American. And rather than any sentimental optimism that music ‘from the New World’ may once have evoked, Powell revels in the diversity of expression encompassed by his chosen composers, with a notable emphasis on themes of loss, mourning and death. Thus the longest piece, Bolcom’s ‘Billy in the Darbies’ (for voice and string quartet), anchors the album with an emotionally complex interior monodrama that illuminates what the composer views as ‘the dark, tragic humour’ of Herman Melville’s text (from Billy Budd). Its sardonic qualities – so different from Britten’s treatment – find their echo in Bolcom’s cabaret songs (represented in epigrammatic and narrative forms alike). Musto’s Enough Rope is a taut mini-cycle of three songs that mirror the acid wit of Dorothy Parker, only to end with surprising poignancy. Yet another brand of humour, wildly imaginative, populates Laitman’s Men with Small Heads, a cycle setting poet Thomas Lux’s vividly eccentric snapshots of mid-20th-century America.

Powell has for decades led an admirable international career on the opera stage. This experience is evident in his ability to locate the dramatic inflection points of these pieces – to deeply moving effect in ‘Father’s Song’, with words as well as music by Ricky Ian Gordon, which dramatises a father’s acknowledgement of how his behaviour has led to his daughter’s suicide by overdose. Powell’s vocal and theatrical versatility comes into play throughout the album – in ways, as he points out, that have liberated his own ‘American voice’.