Anyone at Steven Blier’s latest Wolf Trap recital this past August likely wanted to hear more from mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke. Washingtonians had that wish fulfilled by Young Concert Artists, who sponsored her Sunday afternoon recital in the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater. Cooke and her excellent associate artist, pianist Pei-Yao Wang, presented an attractive program of relative rareties from the 19th- and 20th-century song repertory to a relatively full house.

The concert opened memorably with a composed, calm rendering of the first song of Samuel Barber’s Four Songs, op. 13, a setting of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s A Nun Takes the Veil. It is always enlightening to hear a complete set of which one song is particularly well known, in this case, Sure on This Shining Night (poem by James Agee). Cooke’s English pronunciation and diction made the texts very clear, a strength that helped make the John Musto song cycle, Shadow of the Blues, the high point of the afternoon. Here, wisely with no introduction to the music or poetry, Cooke gave us three other songs from the cycle to go along with the extraordinary Litany on the Wolf Trap program. Musto has made a successful hybridization of styles in his absorption of jazz, blues, and Broadway sounds. The listener can recognize the references, but Musto has incorporated them into a new and much more interesting sound world.