The Vocal Arts DC season came to an early close Friday evening when mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron and pianist Kunal Lahiry performed an intriguing program for their debut in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater. The songs centered on colonial interrelationships, an exotic flavor echoed by the Singaporean-British singer’s pink, sari-like dress and bare feet, and the Indian-American pianist’s baggy Dhoti pants and make-up.

The evening began in the Americas, with two songs featuring texts in Quechua, the indigenous language of Peru. Theodoro Valcarcel, a Peruvian composer, wrote his 31 Cantos del Alma Vernacular in 1936, in a chromatically rich but still tonal idiom, mixing his mestizo heritage and European musical training. Barron’s especially rich lower register elicited the melancholy of the narrator in “Tungu tungu,” asking his lover why she is sad.

The Valcarel song paired beautifully with “Doundou Tchil,” a song from Olivier Messiaen’s Harawi—Chant d’amour et de mort, with Quechua text and dance rhythms refracted through French modernism. Barron’s repeated, almost pitchless statements of the title words evoked the ringing of bells, worn on the man’s ankles during this danced courtship song. Lahiry’s flashy roulades at the keyboard echoed this tintinnabulation, as well as the mysterious answer of birdsong.

The duo next explored the nexus of Spain, Cuba, Africa, and America with two songs from Catalan composer Xavier Montsalvatge’s Cinco Canciones Negras. Cuban dance rhythms pulsated through “Cuba dentro de un Piano” and “Punto de Habanera,” cultural elements being sidelined, in the poet’s perspective, by the American business presence on the island. Lahiry also excelled in the jazzy, virtuosic keyboard part of Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona’s “La Señora Luna.”

A set of songs in German by Jewish composers rounded out the concert’s first half. Barron’s voice may not have the heft needed for the mezzo-soprano songs of Gustav Mahler’s Chinese-influenced Das Lied von der Erde, but she brought the necessary sweetness and shimmer to “Von der Schönheit.” Lahiry, drawing on considerable strength and subtlety in his accompaniment, produced an appropriately orchestral range of sound in the long interlude and postlude.

Arnold Schoenberg’s “Tot” provided an enigmatic punch, an extremely short song based acerbically on a twelve-tone row. Technical issues with Lahiry’s score-reading tablet marred the two excerpts from Kurt Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins, set in Louisiana. While Weill and Schoenberg fled to the United States, the Czech poet and songwriter Ilse Weber was not so lucky, a fate of which her haunting children’s song “Ich wandre durch Theresienstadt” proved a stark reminder. In this and all the evening’s music, Barron was a compelling narrator.

For the second half, the performers turned toward Asia, beginning with “Ragamalika,” composed by Maurice Delage, one-time student of Ravel, during a visit to India. Lahiry established a hypnotic pace, centered on a repeated pedal note altered by a piece of paper under the string to sound like a drum. Barron reveled in the static melodic writing, sung with a slightly nasal tone, in the Delage and in Indian-American composer Kamala Sankaram’s “The Far Shore, especially its ecstatic vocalise section and vital sense of rhythmic dance.

Persia, seen through European eyes, took center stage in the last two songs from Ravel’s Schéhérazade, which Barron sang with impeccable French pronunciation. Her seductive handling of the melodic material was matched by Lahiry, as he brought a delicate, even misty touch to the sibylline accompaniment.

Perhaps the finest achievement of the evening was a newly commissioned song by Kian Ravaei, “I Will Greet the Sun Again,” set to a Farsi text by feminist Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad. The composer, son of Iranian immigrants to the United States, created tension by basing the score around an ostinato trill buzzing in the middle of the piano. With a rich harmonic idiom at her back, Barron gave eloquent voice to Farrokhzad’s relentless sense of a woman’s rebirth.

A final group of songs centered on China began with another authentic evocation of a foreign land, “Ananurhan,” a setting of a folk song by Uyghur composer Zubaida Azezi, with contributions from Edo Frenkel. Different preparations to the piano empowered Lahiry to create the sounds of drums and other folk instruments. Barron, singing directly over the piano’s strings, created a rainbow of ghostly overtones in her opening and closing cantillations.

Huang Ruo’s “Fisherman’s Sonnet” and Chen Yi’s “Monologue” both imitated the nasal wail of Peking Opera, especially the latter song. In spite of some improvisational elements and atonal interest, the Ruo song’s largely barren recitative style wearied the ear. Chen Yi, born in China like Ruo, once served as concertmaster of the Peking Opera in Beijing, giving her melodic writing, with its almost spoken quality and many pitch slides, an especially authentic feel.

Two Chinese folk songs, “Northeast Lullaby” and “Fengyang Flower Drum Song,” brought the concert, pleasing from start to finish, back home for Barron, who grew up in Hong Kong. The modern arrangements of these simple songs added a European harmonic background, rounding out the cultural exchange explored by this alluring program. A single encore, the evening’s first piece, “Tungu Tungu,” completed the circle.

Vocal Arts DC will announce its 2025-2026 season in the coming weeks. vocalartsdc.org

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