In 2024, the Grammy Award–winning baritone Will Liverman made his Festival debut alongside the Grammy-nominated pianist Myra Huang, and this summer we’re excited to welcome back both amazing artists for a noon recital on Wednesday, July 29, when they’ll perform charming songs by Ravel and Poulenc as well as Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer (a deeply moving song cycle that evokes the anguish of lost love), and American composer Robert Owens’s Mortal Storm, a stirring setting of five stunning poems by the famous Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes.
Liverman—who’s been called “one of the most versatile singing artists performing today” by Bachtrack and “a voice for this historic moment” by The Washington Post—started studying opera when he was 13, after he enrolled in the Governor’s School for the Arts in Norfolk, Virginia, where he was born. (Liverman grew up roughly 20 miles away, in Virgina Beach.) Prior to that, Liverman “didn’t know anything about opera,” he said in an interview with NPR. “I grew up with a big, heavy gospel background. . . . And I grew up with piano as well.”
After graduating from the Governor’s School, Liverman earned his bachelor’s degree from Wheaton College and his master’s degree from The Juilliard School. He also trained at the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Ryan Opera Center, and he was a Glimmerglass Festival Young Artist. Liverman’s numerous honors include winning The Metropolitan Opera’s Beverly Sills Artist Award, the Marian Anderson Vocal Award, the Sphinx Medal of Excellence, and the Richard Tucker Career Grant. As one of today’s most in-demand singers, he’s appeared at the world’s leading venues and with the world’s leading companies and ensembles, including Carnegie Hall, the BBC Proms, the London Symphony Orchestra, Dutch National Opera, Opera Philadelphia, Washington National Opera, the San Francisco Symphony, The Cleveland Orchestra, and many others.
Liverman is carving a distinctive path for himself in many ways, including by championing living and underperformed composers and by writing his own works. In 2023, he starred in the opera The Factotum, a retelling of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville that he co-wrote and that was premiered at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Three years earlier, Liverman became the first Black artist to sing the role of Papageno in Mozart’s The Magic Flute at The Metropolitan Opera. “Being able to be a part of Met history,” Liverman said in an interview with Explore Classical Music, “was a feeling I will never forget as I stepped out on stage.” In another piece of Met history, in 2021, Liverman opened The Met’s first post-Covid season by starring in Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, the first opera by a Black composer to be performed at The Met. A recording of that production won a Grammy Award in 2023.
Another significant recording for Liverman—Dreams of a New Day: Songs by Black Composers with pianist Paul Sánchez—was released not long before that, in 2021. The chart-topping, Grammy-nominated album features music by Harry Burleigh, Margaret Bonds, Leslie Adams, Damien Sneed, and Thomas Kerr as well as Shawn E. Okpebholo, whose two-movement song cycle Two Black Churches was commissioned by Liverman. The album also features Liverman’s own arrangement of Richard Fariña’s “Birmingham Sunday,” and it includes one of the song cycles Liverman and Huang will be performing on their July 29 recital: Mortal Storm, by Robert Owens.
Mortal Storm features settings of five poems by Langston Hughes, starting with the mysterious “A House in Taos.” Hughes hadn’t been to Taos when he wrote that song, but, he said, the most “exotic and jittery writers” he knew had been.