The surprise with this vocal recital is that there aren’t more like it. The selected programme is prompted by pandemic-era issues, recorded in a venue that’s hopefully away from Covid hotspots (Chapel Hill, North Carolina) and performed with a deep sense of mission. The musical panorama assembled by baritone Lucas Meachem and pianist Irina Meachem includes black composers (William Grant Still and Florence Price) and poets alert to social causes (James Baldwin, Walt Whitman, Gene Scheer), as well as titles (‘Oh, Shenandoah’) and composers (Jake Heggie, Ricky Ian Gordon, Kurt Weill) who are welcome in any American song collection.

Poets and composers are well represented. Weill was well into his American Broadway period in the 1940s but knew to re-employ his Germanic gravitas to animate Whitman’s distinctly American voice in ‘Beat! Beat! Drums!’. Heggie’s ‘That moment on’, written in memory of 9/11 and detailing random objects left in the wake of the tragedy, wistfully begins in restrained Reynaldo Hahn mode, evolving into the kind of narrative that only a fine opera composer could accomplish. In the ongoing discovery of Florence Price, this mid-20th-century composer is heard in the song ‘Night’, the finest discovery of this collection, in which a lovely through-composed vocal line unfolds with gentle, rocking-back-and-forth motion in the piano. Time and again, pianist Irina Meachem sensitively brings out the French Impressionist influences in several of these songs.

If the disc seems a bit short, clocking in at just under 53 minutes, the singing is so interpretatively exhausting that you wouldn’t want it to be a moment longer. Meachem is a formidable vocal presence, more robust and charismatic than one might expect from his appearance in The Ghosts of Versailles (Pentatone, 6/16). But the deployment of his voice is tactically misguided from the tremulous first moments. Meachem spills his guts, to put it in the vernacular, making nearly every song a vehicle for his own rage and disillusionment.

How much those emotions coincide with those of the composer isn’t always easy to determine, so much are these performances a matter of interpretation over content. So outsized is his mode of expression in the Weill song that this listener felt harangued. Often, the simpler the song, the more the music is overloaded with extremes of loud and soft, whether full-throated or nearly whispered. Comparisons between Thomas Hampson in Stephen Foster’s ‘Hard times’ (Warner) and Meachem show the two singers using similar techniques, though Hampson (who isn’t ideal in this music but tries in all the right ways) uses words with a clarity that allows them to make their point while leaving room for listeners to make their own personal connections.

The deeply felt elegance that Jan DeGaetani brought to ‘In the mornin’’ arranged by Charles Ives (Nonesuch, 11/76) shows how far Meachem goes into overstatement, more emphatic than any evangelistic preacher I’ve encountered. And ‘Oh, Shenandoah’? It’s pushed, pulled and at times stopped in every imaginable way for rhetorical emphasis. Does this reflect a loss of perspective in the isolation of lockdown? When the late Jessye Norman was moving into less classical repertoire, she was appalled at the prospect of compromising her usual interpretative dignity. ‘The audience wouldn’t know what to do with me!’ she exclaimed. Having heard Meachem, I now understand what she meant.