Expect a different sound when Susana Baca sings at the Howard Theatre on Tuesday. “I won’t be performing with the usual band of Peruvian musicians,” so the repertoire “is going to have very different nuances,” the champion of Afro-Peruvian music said by phone from Boston, shortly after a concert there.

Backing her up at the D.C. gig, Baca said, will be a group of musicians with connections to Boston’s Berklee College of Music — artists such as the Grammy-honored bassist Oscar Stagnaro, who is a professor at that institution. The band will include a Venezuelan-born violinist and a Brazilian-born guitarist, Baca said.

It’s the latest jaunt in Baca’s international musical journey, which began during her childhood in Chorrillos, on the outskirts of Lima, Peru. She evinced a keen interest in music as a girl; later, she gained a mentor in the noted composer and singer Chabuca Granda. Baca was a founder of the Instituto Negrocontinuo in Lima, which focuses on the preservation of Afro-Peruvian culture.

Baca gained international attention after David Byrne (of Talking Heads fame) included her rendition of “Maria Lando” on the 1995 album “The Soul of Black Peru,” which he co-compiled. Byrne included his own version of the song, a melancholy anthem about a weary worker. Since then, Baca has released a number of albums, including “Afrodiaspora,” issued in 2011, the year she became Peru’s minister of culture and the country’s first black cabinet member.

Her tenure in the job lasted only a few months, but it was an eye-opening experience, she said, speaking in Spanish and letting her colleague, producer Greg Landau, translate. As minister, she traveled all over Peru and was particularly struck by “how the people who live near a lot of the historical monuments, like Machu Picchu and others, feel part of those monuments and very tied to them, demanding that the state provide the resources to take care of them.”

Since stepping down from her political post, Baca, 70, has recorded a collection of Nigerian and Afro-Peruvian music with a 60-voice Nigerian choir. She says the undertaking generated “beautiful moments” that she expects to grace an album in the not-so-distant future.

Fear not, fans: Baca will sing “Maria Lando” at her Howard Theatre engagement. “The song is perfect for this concert because it shows one of the important rhythms in Afro-Peruvian music,” Baca said via e-mail, referring to the traditional dance form that is the lando. Also, she said, “the lyrics are poetry that honors working women.” That’s a topic she knows something about.

A ‘Moonlight’ fixation

Before Armenian-born pianist Karine Poghosyan could play Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata, she pretended she could play Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata. She has vivid memories of sitting in the living room at age 6 or so, listening to a recording of the Beethoven work and fantasizing that she was producing the sound. She positioned the reflective surface of a doll case so that she could see herself “moving my fingers like crazy, feeling the emotion,” she recalls.

That imaginary recital testified to the passion that would fuel Poghosyan’s music career. The award-winning pianist, now 34, has performed at Carnegie Hall and other notable venues and has announced the upcoming release of an album on the Naxos label. On Dec. 5, she will make her Washington debut in a concert at the Embassy of Armenia. Part of the Embassy Series, the performance will feature, among other offerings, works by Armenian composers Aram Khachaturian and Komitas Vardapet. Also on tap: the “Moonlight” Sonata. “Beethoven has a very special place in my heart,” Poghosyan said in a Skype conversation from New York.

She played Beethoven (Piano Concerto No. 1) when she made her orchestral debut in Yerevan, Armenia, at age 14. When she was 18, her family moved to the United States, pursuing opportunities for her father, a visual artist. Poghosyan lives in New York, where she teaches at the Manhattan School of Music. The Big Apple offers ample opportunities for her favorite pastime — museum-going — as well as for her coffee obsession. “I’m a huge coffee freak — terrible,” the pianist says a little ruefully. “I’m addicted to cappuccinos.”

This year, the caffeine must have come in handy: Poghosyan has a string of fall recitals in the rearview mirror and a Beethoven birthday celebration, among other projects, coming up. She says 2015 will see the release of her album of works by Khachaturian, another composer for whom she feels ardent reverence.

Khachaturian’s Armenian heritage makes him “the biggest sign of survival and triumph for us as a nation, because his music is so powerful, so energetic” and so “invigorating,” Poghosyan says. She believes that those qualities resonate all the more given that Khachaturian composed in the aftermath of the mass killings of Armenians that occurred in the Ottoman Empire’s waning days.

Pianist Kariné Poghosyan. (Jeffrey Langford/Jeffrey Langford)

The centennial of that atrocity, widely termed genocide, will be commemorated in 2015. Poghosyan wants to recognize the occasion, but not brood on it. “I definitely want to do everything in my power as an artist to move us away from reliving the pain again,” Poghosyan says. Performing Khachaturian is, for her, a way to “symbolize triumph over such a dark event.”

Beethoven’s struggle with deafness makes his biography, too, a tale of triumph over tribulation. Most of us “can look at that story and realize how minuscule our problems are” by comparison, Poghosyan says.

Susana Baca. Nov. 25 at 8 p.m. At the Howard Theatre, 620 T St. NW. Call 202-803-2899 or visit thehowardtheatre.com.

Karine Poghosyan. Dec. 5 at 7:30 p.m. At the Embassy of Armenia, 2225 R St. NW. Call 202-625-2361 or visit www.embassyseries.org.

Wren is a freelance writer.