He grew up with a sense of music being not decorative but essential-deeply functional, serving a need, serving a range of needs. Sellars later told me, “The first time I heard Davóne, it was so clear that he sang because he had something to say, not simply because he has a beautiful voice. The director Peter Sellars, who helped launch Tines’s international career by casting him in Kaija Saariaho’s 2016 chamber opera, “Only the Sound Remains,” attended the Los Angeles recital, a presentation in the long-running Monday Evening Concerts series. It was always about finding the connections so I didn’t go crazy.” Julius Eastman was Black and gay like me-he’s someone I idolize. I also sang Bach, opera, new classical music. And what I put into it is my own lived experience. Anything that I put into it will assume a certain shape. “The ritualistic template of the Mass is a proven structure-centuries of culture have upheld it. He spent years planning the program that became “ mass,” and ultimately hit upon a structure built around the Latin liturgy. He shows up at recording sessions with a precise concept of how his voice should be equalized he knows about lighting, lenses, film stock his program notes are couched in his own elegant prose.
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Tines, who has a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Harvard and has worked in arts administration, has his own ideas about how to present himself in public. And I’d always ask myself, ‘Hmm-why didn’t that happen the whole time?’ ” And there’d be a section at the end where you were allowed to do something ‘fun.’ I saw this type of recital so many times, and at the end you’d see a person suddenly come alive. “You were supposed to follow a template, where you establish your abilities in various areas-antique Italian arias, Lieder, and so on. “When I was at Juilliard, we were given instruction in how to build a recital,” Tines told me. In person, he is urbane, discursive, and playful, though he speaks with an unguarded directness that is not often encountered in the nervous corridors of classical music. Tines, whose first name is pronounced “da- von,” arrived with his suitcase in tow: he was heading to Detroit, where he is an artist-in-residence at the Michigan Opera Theatre, and where, next spring, he will sing the title role of Anthony Davis’s 1986 opera, “ X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X.” Onstage, Tines is an intense, magnetic presence, and also, at six feet two and a half, a towering one. The next day, at a café in the Hollywood Hills, Tines ordered a sausage-and-spinach scramble and spoke to me about the “ mass” program-one of several projects in which he is challenging the conventions of classical music, tackling themes of race and sexuality and expanding what it means to possess an operatic voice. Tines conveyed this music with disciplined desperation, rising to a siren-like wail on the line “Joan, speak boldly when they question you.” It culminated in another startling a-cappella moment: a rendition of “ Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc,” by the avant-garde Black composer Julius Eastman, who died in obscurity in 1990. I had never heard a recital quite like it: instead of the usual smorgasbord of tastefully varied selections, it felt like a sustained creative statement, almost a composition in itself. The singer was the thirty-four-year-old bass-baritone Davóne Tines, performing with the pianist Adam Nielsen at the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, in September. In a matter of minutes, we had traversed multiple centuries and worlds, yet all the music was filtered through the taut resonance of one voice: a timbre at once grand and fraught, potent and vulnerable. There followed another segment of Shaw’s Mass, the Agnus Dei.
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Once he reached the front of the church, he walked over to a piano, where an accompanist was waiting for him, and launched into Bach’s “Wie jammern mich,” from the cantata “Vergnügte Ruh”: “How I bewail those wayward hearts / That set themselves against you, my God.” He then sang the spiritual “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?,” in a ghostly, semi-modernist arrangement by Tyshawn Sorey. The singer wore a black suit jacket over a black tank top, with a pearl rosary around his neck. The singer entered from the back, walking slowly, delivering an a-cappella setting of the Kyrie from the traditional Mass, by the contemporary composer Caroline Shaw: “Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy.” The light was low, almost séance-like.
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1: mass,” in black letters on a white background.
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Before the altar of the church stood a large screen displaying the words “ recital no.