On December 1, we observed World AIDS Day and on December 6, Downtown Music Productions (DMP) Artistic Director, conductor and pianist Mimi Stern-Wolfe added, to this season of thoughtful remembrance, a DMP Benson AIDS Series recital, with heldentenor Gilles Denizot, supported by Stern-Wolfe at the piano, singing two song cycles by gifted composer Chris DeBlasio-one of the great losses to AIDS, who died on July 20, 1993 at the age of 34-and one by Johannes Brahms, at St. Mark's in the Bowery. Denizot, who flew in from Hamburg, Germany, especially for the performance was, unfortunately, suffering from a cold, but bravely soldiered on through the afternoon.

The first DeBlasio work was "Villagers" (1990), with poetry by Ilsa Gilbert and Perry Brass, who were present. Denizot sang, with apt simplicity, the whimsical, childlike "Paris" (Gilbert)-which is not about the city in France, but about having a blue elephant, its namesake, as a pet "For two hours." "The Heart Does Not Care (It breaks and leaves)" (Brass) treats a melancholy subject, but never ponderously. Early in the all but breezy, bustling "Butcher" (Gilbert), Denizot gave a line about the eponymous meat vender, "Who wrapped kidneys and liver," a bloodthirsty reading that hinted at the song's dénouement. Here, he limned a teacher, almost at the breaking point-her composer husband ignores her, the students she tries to educate ignore her, too-who compares the spouse with the simpler butcher, proud of "his son's graduation/From the Police Academy"-her mate's grating, incomprehensible "Music that beats the heart" pounds "Like the butcher/Pounds meat/On his wooden block;" the husband dotes on "A cheap and pretty clerk/Who compounds my misery," the butcher "drank Coors/And eyed the whores/Congregating/At the far end/Of the bar." Matter-of-factly, as the score indicates, urgently, but light-heartedly, Denizot reported on the violence perpetrated upon the clueless mate-"She took a china knick knack/And smashed it over his head,/Breaking his concentration/And part of his cerebral cortex"-and her musing that the rookie cop might be the one to come to arrest her. After "Rushes" (Gilbert), sung lightly, came the propulsive "Lyric 4" (Brass), an offbeat declaration of love-"I will keep you in my pocket," "I will slit your lips with my fingers"-in which the tenor's perfect pairs of melismas on the word "song," repeated three times during the song, betrayed nothing of his illness.

In Brahms' "Vier ernste Gesänge" (Four Serious Songs, 1896), from late in the composer's life, to texts from Martin Luther's translations of the Books of Ecclesiastes and Corinthians, the songs eliciting virtuoso pianism from Stern-Wolfe, Denizot solemnly contemplated the meaning of life and death, what perishes and what lives on s after (in "Denn es gehet dem Menschen"), and courageously embraced the ultimate fate (in "Wenn ich mit Menschen"), and resourcefully resorted to light head tone when his full, rich sound proved recalcitrant.

DeBlasio and Brass' "All the Way Through Evening" (1990), a setting Brass called "one of the great works of art to come out of the AIDS crisis," consists of "Five Nocturnes," as much about the ebbing and ending of life as the waning of light and close of day. Denizot sounded refreshed, his voice clear as he sang the beautiful "The Disappearance of Light." In the agitated "Train Station," he probed the conflicting emotions attendant upon a very public, perhaps final farewell, ending with an impulsive kiss, in defiance of whatever observers might think. In "An Elegy to Paul Jacobs," he recalled the late New York Philharmonic pianist and harpsichordist-the setting is Central Park and its Ramble, not a very far walk from Lincoln Center, but, with its windblown leaves seeming to mourn Jacobs as well, a world away from the cultural complex. And in "Poussin," replete with classical, painterly images, he saluted "the beautiful men," heroes on horseback, who "ride into the night" "Forever." The cycle, and the recital, concluded with DeBlasio's single most wrenching song, "Walt Whitman in 1989," which posits the return of the great gay poet to tend and comfort young men dying of AIDS, as he did wounded soldiers in a military hospital during the Civil War. Observing that the crisis hasn't killed our love-"he says it's good we haven't lost/our closeness"-Denizot tenderly sang Whitman's lullaby to "a dying man in his arms," as he conducted him down "the River/of dusk and lamentation" to the end of life, "all the way through evening," as the achingly exquisite final phrases, of Wagnerian majesty, put it. It is a tribute to Denizot and Stern-Wolfe, to Brass and DeBlasio's stunning, moving eloquence that there was, at first, a hush before the applause began.

DPM's next effort is a recital on January 17, 2010, by baritone Anthony Turner, with Stern-Wolfe, including William Grant Still's "Songs of Separation." Visit www.downtownmusicproductions.org, email dmpmimi@verizon.net, or call 212/477-1594 for further information.