Will Liverman: “Dreams of a New Day”

For his new album, “Dreams of a New Day,” the baritone Will Liverman wanted to step beyond spirituals to shine a light on other eminently programmable material by Black composers, such as Harry Burleigh’s dynamic, lovelorn “Five Songs of Laurence Hope” (1915) and Margaret Bonds’s persevering “Three Dream Portraits” (1959), which describes the African-American experience using Langston Hughes’s words. Shawn E. Okpebholo’s staggering “Two Black Churches” (2020) crowns the album, recounting racially motivated massacres in Birmingham, in 1963, and in Charleston, in 2015, with poetry and grace. Liverman and the pianist Paul Sánchez perform the diptych with clarity, sensitivity, and barely contained heartbreak.