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Music Review

Locating Love Between Silly and Serious

When Paul McCartney sang “Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs” in 1976, he was merely stating the obvious. Nor does the world lack for serious love songs. But writers have also portrayed amorous subjects in countless shades of gray, and it was to some of those works that the New York Festival of Song turned for a concert on Wednesday night in the Peter Jay Sharp Theater at the Juilliard School.

“A Modern Person’s Guide to Hooking Up and Breaking Up,” the third concert that Steven Blier and Michael Barrett have presented in collaboration with the Juilliard vocal department, offered a quirky survey that dealt with the awkwardness, pain, lust and perversity of interpersonal affairs.

There were art songs by Leonard Bernstein and Paul Moravec, German cabaret by Kurt Weill and Olaf Bienert, musical-theater numbers by Jerome Kern and Cole Porter, pop songs by the Beatles and Bruce Springsteen, and novelties that didn’t neatly fit into any category. The program was liberally punctuated with quotations from romance experts, including St. Augustine, Oscar Wilde and Miss Piggy.

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Rebecca Jo Loeb at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater.

The wide-eyed innocence of “Standing on the Corner,” Frank Loesser’s mellow ode to cruising, quickly gave way to sly double-entendres in Christopher Berg’s “Is It Dirty,” based on a Frank O’Hara poem, and “Mein kleiner grüner Kaktus” (“My Little Green Cactus”), a suggestive number from the repertory of the 1930s German ensemble the Comedian Harmonists.

William Bolcom’s “I Knew a Woman” captured the libidinous undercurrents of Theodore Roethke’s verse with a bluesy vocal line, vividly delivered by the tenor Paul Appleby, and two clashing piano parts. Justine F. Chen’s “Internal Monologue Drinking Song,” sensitively sung by Marc Webster, a bass, conveyed a lonely man’s awkwardness in a gay bar with juddering lines and clumsy gestures.

Renée Tatum, a mezzo, brought a world-weary gravitas to Mr. Bolcom’s “At the Last Lousy Moments of Love.” The tenor Alex Mansoori, accompanied by playfully choreographed backing vocalists, sang brightly in “Do It Yourself,” a jaunty ode to self-gratification by Ed Kleban.

David McFerrin, a tall, handsome baritone, took on imbalanced characters with surprising ease in James Sellars’s “JNNY,” a stoner’s ardent paean to a cashier whose name and face he can’t quite recall, and Gabriel Kahane’s “Neurotic and Lonely,” based on a quirky personal ad found on Craigslist.

The soprano Meredith Lustig gave a suitably luminous rendition of Adam Guettel’s “Light in the Piazza.” Paul La Rosa, a baritone, dug into Tom Lehrer’s “Masochism Tango” with gusto; likewise the mezzo Rebecca Jo Loeb in “Tamara, Queen of the Nile,” Peter Winkler’s ballad of an introverted schoolteacher who moonlights as a stripper. The soprano Jennifer Zetlan conveyed quiet passion with no words at all in André Previn’s haunting “Vocalise.”

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