Music Reviews : Sharp Sings a Touching American Program

Debut recitals can be like auctions--cold-blooded, cut-and-dried affairs, efficient and profitable. William Sharp’s first local appearance, on the Gold Medal series at Ambassador Auditorium, however, was none of the kind: It touched the listener from first to last. Especially last.

The American baritone, winner of the 1987 Carnegie Hall American Music Competition, stuck his neck out far in putting together an agenda for Monday night. It was a full program of songs by American composers of our century, sung in English.

The only reason for mounting such a project, of course, is to do so successfully. Sharp and his personable musical partner, pianist Steven Blier, succeeded entirely.

To put on an evening of 20th-Century American songs and include only one item by Samuel Barber, and leave out Lee Hoiby and Ned Rorem completely? Perhaps Sharp wants to be invited back, the next time to delve into the repertory by those three masters--arguably, along with Gershwin, our greatest song-writers.

In any case, no apologies were necessary for this agenda. It included three songs by Leonard Bernstein, a Copland group, three items (the last the single encore) by the neglected Marc Blitzstein, and samplings from the works of Virgil Thomson, Charles Ives and Paul Bowles, as well as by the relatively unknown Christopher Berg and John Musto.

Sharp is no bel-canto paragon; the pleasant, mellow voice is as slender as the man, its size not huge, its resonance not booming.

But the 39-year-old musician from Missouri has a range of vocal expressiveness as wide as the repertory it encompasses; his command of dynamics is most accomplished, his application of color admirable. And he savors words, without making a fetish of them, using his actor’s face with a subtlety that projects.

Thoroughly and consistently assisted by Bliers--who now and again grew rambunctious and threatened to cover the singer, dynamically--Sharp delivered a whole gallery of character studies in these varied songs, and touched his audience most effectively.

Best was last, in his only encore, Blitzstein’s chilling and poignant “Ballad of the Bombardier,” from the wartime “Airborne Symphony” (1943-46), a song not about true love but about the inarticulateness of true love.