LI-raised opera star Zelotes Edmund Toliver headed home to sing spirituals at Cinema Arts

Although he has performed in some of the world’s greatest concert venues — from the Vienna State Opera House to New York City’s Carnegie Hall — Zelotes Edmund Toliver says he is most at home when singing on the East End of Long Island.

“It is deeply emotional for me,” says Toliver, who moved from Riverhead to Austria more than four decades ago to pursue his operatic career. (He now lives in Dortmund, Germany.) “The memories come back in a flood.”

Those wistful sentiments are sure to inform Toliver’s spirituals program in honor of Black History Month and his own family’s strong musical legacy at Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington on Sunday. “Both of my grandfathers were crooners, my brother is a classical singer, and my dad and three uncles sang in church — one as a singing preacher. I just thought everyone did that,” he says.

While Toliver has largely built his reputation performing the leading bass roles in operas by Mozart, Verdi and Wagner, his connection to spirituals, a distinctly American folk genre that flourished before the abolishment of slavery in the 1860s, is more direct. “I remember the seasonal workers from the South in Greenport singing in their regional dialect,” says Toliver, whose grandparents’ home, now a historic landmark, remains one of the oldest in the North Fork seaport. “As a child I got into the rhythm of their speech.”

Toliver channeled those memories in 1989, when the musical director of a Lutheran church near the opera house where he was an ensemble member in Graz, Austria, asked if he would be interested in doing a spirituals concert. “They are almost adaptations of Christian hymns put to African rhythm,” he says, noting the genre’s origin as an oral tradition. “There are many titles, but few with complete or partial music.”

Today, the singer’s spiritual repertoire has expanded considerably. He performs slower, introspective songs such as “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” one of the earliest and broadly known spirituals, as well as more upbeat melodies, like the Caribbean-influenced “Goin’ Shout All Over God’s Heaven,” commonly referred to as shouts or jubilees. Toliver, who has enjoyed academic appointments in Boston and Germany, incorporates explanations of “the role, life and development” of his iconic set lists into his performance program.

“They are songs of deep expression and it is my obligation to present them, put them out in the world. I am the medium,” Toliver says. “It’s not personal, but I always get choked up.”