Yet another move towards the playlist format for song recitals? If so, it’s a thoughtful one, with the singer acting as his own piano accompanist in 27 songs from 11 countries that are intended ‘to speak to the universal themes that can heal a broken world: love and longing, peace and prosperity’, according to the booklet notes.

Longing, for example, is heard from far flung places such as the Chinese song ‘How can I not think of her?’ by Zhao Yuanren and ‘Terra e mare’ (‘Land and sea’) by Puccini. One strong undercurrent is sympathy for the downtrodden, not with specific references to refugees but more generally in songs such as Verdi’s ‘Il poveretto’. Perhaps in the interest of being open-ended, the album’s title stops just short of completing the question from Psalm 2:1, ‘Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain?’

Much of the sequencing unfolds intuitively with a mixture of recital favourites such as Schubert’s ‘Die Forelle’ and Ravel’s ‘Chanson à boire’ from the Don Quichotte cycle. Familiar names are heard in less familiar territory: the often folksy Aaron Copland seems to have been writing for a political rally in ‘Zion’s Walls’, genteel Samuel Barber is represented by ‘I hear an army’ (with a James Joyce text that’s anything but pro-military) and, most curious, the often-nostalgic Charles Ives ends the recital with ‘Majority’, which projects multiple points of view, seeming to praise and fear the masses from one phrase to the next. However they might fit into the overall concept, two particular songs are significant discoveries: the heartfelt, lyrical, simple ‘Petits enfants’ by Émile Paladilhe (recorded here for the first time) and the unvarnished expression of loss in ‘Meu amor me disse adeus’ by Cláudio Santoro.

A pervasive presence on the American opera scene since the mid-1990s, Powell is clearly seasoned but his robust baritone wears its mileage well, even though he doesn’t put his best efforts first: Puccini’s ‘Morire?’, which opens the recording, has a climactic upward leap that’s not well managed. From there, though, he makes this wide-ranging repertoire feel like home. I can’t say with any authority if his Japanese, Korean and Chinese enunciation is credible, though Powell does locate the music’s distinctive inner tranquillity. Best moments include Britten’s ‘Every night and every morn’ with a William Blake text that seems to hit the philosophical core of this recital programme. His voice and sensibility are perfect for Michael Head’s rhetorically charged lament ‘Money, O!’.

He lightens his voice with great poetic effect for Montsalvatge’s ‘Canción de cuna’, though some less than graceful vocalism during Fauré’s ‘Mandoline’ and Obradors’s ‘¿Corazón porqué pasáis?’ reminds you that this is a voice built for Verdi. Indeed, his website lists Rigoletto and Macbeth in his repertoire, while his discography includes Mahler’s Symphony No 8 with David Zinman (RCA, 7/10). And his own piano accompaniment? No problems, even with Ives’s challenging tone clusters.

The one misstep is in the booklet. Translations are arranged by their country of origin, not the order in which they appear on the recording. One is often distracted by hunting down the text for the song at hand.