On paper, the program looked like a perverse joke - strange songs by long-forgotten composers and so-so ones by familiar figures such as Poulenc and Debussy, all hailing from the World War I era. The appeal wasn't nostalgia - the audience wasn't that old - but a tour through the attic of your eccentric grandparents in a 90-minute concert without intermission.

Oddest of all was a cycle of 30-second songs (and some even shorter) written by one Carrie Jacobs-Bond and consisting of little more than such homespun aphorisms as "Success never comes to the sleeping." There were songs about germs and Satan protesting the wars of mankind. We're talking cultural roadkill here, stuff that's best left behind in the era that spawned it except when sung by a fine singer and good strategist like Meglioranza.

Much of the delight (and there was plenty) was afforded by Meglioranza's healthy love of absurdity and folly that unexpectedly arise from something serious - all aggrandized with no sense of mockery. The fairly seasoned 39-year-old baritone (whom I've heard in Bach's St. Matthew Passion in New York as well as the hapless Chaucer-inspired musical The Loathly Lady last spring at Irvine Auditorium) has an effortless sense of style that arises naturally out of the needs of words and music. He fluffed up the phrases of Rudolf Sieczynski's "Vienna, My City of Dreams" and found logic in fractured word settings of Charles Ives.

The unfussy beauty of his voice - his upper range suggests the boyish tone of the great Gerard Souzay - makes him a phone-book baritone able to make the thinnest repertoire alluring. Few recitalists are so at home onstage with a physical freedom to thoroughly characterize the song without fear of possible embarrassment - particularly important in Poulenc's characterization of camels and lobsters in his "Le Bestiaire" song cycle.

Meglioranza didn't court the audience - with his Italian/Thai/Polish good looks he doesn't have to - but assumed that we were already friends and would like everything he did. And he was right, even in three potentially alienating atonal songs by Anton Webern that he introduced by describing them as so delicate that "I feel like I'm blowing bubbles." I'd love to hear him take on canonic works like Schumann's "Dichterliebe." But at this point, I'd trust him in any program in which he trusts himself.