Baritone delivers a charming recital up close

The Taube Theater at the Diane B. Wilsey Center for Opera, which has become the new home for a variety of San Francisco Opera activities, is an interesting mix of spaciousness and intimacy — and sometimes both at once.

Sunday’s Schwabacher Debut Recital by the gifted young baritone Efraín Solís, for example, unfolded beneath the hall’s barnlike high ceiling, but relied on the acoustical wizardry of Meyer Sound’s Constellation to make the singer’s artistry sound up close and personal.

Solís, in fact, seems poised to inhabit that mystical middle realm where opera and the Broadway musical walk hand in hand.

Written in 1948, after the refugee composer had already spent more than a decade adapting his European late-Romantic style to the dictates of Hollywood, these are songs that wear both parts of their lineage proudly.

[...] his natural charm and buoyancy worked wonders for Ravel’s collection of oddball sketches, “Natural Histories.”