Davóne Tines, heralded as an artist "changing what it means to be a classical singer (The New Yorker) and “[one] of the most powerful voices of our time” (Los Angeles Times), is a pathbreaking artist whose work encompasses a diverse repertoire, ranging from early music to new commissions by leading composers, while exploring the social issues of today. A creator, curator and performer at the intersection of many histories, cultures and aesthetics, he is engaged in work that blends opera, art song, spirituals, contemporary classical, gospel and protest songs as a means to tell a deeply personal story of perseverance connecting to all of humanity.
This season, Tines makes his Metropolitan Opera debut performing in John Adams’ El Niño. Additionally, he performs El Niño with the Houston Symphony and an arrangement of the work, titled El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered, with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, where he also sings in Kaija Saariaho’s True Fire. As a member of the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC*), he also tours El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered to Kansas City, Stanford, New Haven and New York at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. He performs in Tod Machover’s VALIS at MIT; John Cage’s “middle operas,” Europeras 3 & 4, which present the Western operatic tradition in a late-20th century form, with Detroit Opera directed by Yuval Sharon; and the world premiere of Terrance McKnight’s Handel: Made in America at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Artist-in-Residence and Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale’s first-ever Creative Partner, taking part in strategic planning, programming and working within the community.
Tines is a musician who takes full agency of his work, devising new programs and pieces from conception to performance. He reflects this ethos in his Recital No. 1: MASS, an examination of the liturgy, comparing Western European, African American and 21st century traditions to lay bare commonalities at the heart of our shared spiritual journeys. The program features works by J.S. Bach, Margaret Bonds, Moses Hogan, Julius Eastman, Caroline Shaw, Tyshawn Sorey, as well as Tines. This season, he performs the recital with pianist John Bitoy in Montreal, Chicago, at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, and in the Netherlands at the String Quartet Biënnale Amsterdam and in Rotterdam. He has performed the recital at Carnegie Hall, Caramoor, the Barbican and Bold Tendencies in London, Baltimore’s Shriver Hall, for the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society and as part of Boston’s Celebrity Series.
In a similar artistic endeavor to his Recital No. 1: MASS, Tines has created two concertos for voice and orchestra. Concerto No. 1: SERMON combines into a concert performance pieces including John Adams’ El Niño; Vigil, written by Tines and Igee Dieudonné with orchestration by Matthew Aucoin; “You Want the Truth, but You Don’t Want to Know,” from Anthony Davis’ X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X; and poems from Langston Hughes, James Baldwin and Maya Angelou. Tines has performed Concerto No. 1: SERMON with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and The Philadelphia Orchestra and with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Concerto No. 2: ANTHEM is an examination of nationhood and our collective visions of America. The work opens with “The Star-Spangled Banner” including its lesser-known verses, in a new arrangement by Michael Schachter, followed by texts by poet Mahogany L. Browne and new works by Tines' frequent collaborators Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Shaw and MacArthur “genius” grant recipient Tyshawn Sorey. The concerto closes with the Black National Anthem, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” also in a new arrangement by Tines and Schachter. Tines premiered Concerto No. 2: ANTHEM with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl in 2022.
Tines recently made a number of important debuts at prominent New York institutions, including the Park Avenue Armory, New York Philharmonic, BAM and Carnegie Hall, continuing to establish a strong presence in the city’s classical scene. He performed the New York premiere of Tyshawn Sorey’s Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) at the Park Avenue Armory in a solo part written specifically for him by Sorey, marking a third collaboration between the pair. Tines also performed Everything Rises, an original, evening-length, staged musical work he created with violinist Jennifer Koh, which premiered in New York as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival. Everything Rises tells the story of Tines’ and Koh’s artistic journeys and family histories through music, projections and recorded interviews. As a platform, it also centers the need for artists of color to be seen and heard. The world premiere of Everything Rises premiered in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles in April 2022, with the LA Times commenting, “Koh and Tines’ stories have made them what they are, but their art needs to be—and is—great enough to tell us who they are.” He made his New York Philharmonic debut performing in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, led by Jaap van Zweden, and his Carnegie Hall recital debut performing Recital No. 1: MASS.
Going beyond the concert hall, Tines also creates short music films that use powerful visuals to accentuate the social and poetic dimensions of the music. In September 2020, Lincoln Center presented his music film VIGIL, which pays tribute to Breonna Taylor, the EMT and aspiring nurse who was shot and killed by police in her Louisville home, and whose tragic death has fueled an international outcry. Created in collaboration with Igee Dieudonné and Conor Hanick, the work was subsequently arranged for orchestra by Matthew Aucoin and premiered in a livestream by Tines and the Louisville Orchestra, conducted by Teddy Abrams. Aucoin’s orchestration is also currently part of Tines’ Concerto No. 1: SERMON. He also co-created Strange Fruit with Jennifer Koh, a film juxtaposing violence against Asian Americans with Ken Ueno’s arrangement of “Strange Fruit”—which the duo perform in Everything Rises—directed by dramaturg Kee-Yoon Nahm. The work premiered virtually as part of Carnegie Hall’s “Voices of Hope Series.” Additional music films include FREUDE, an a cappella “mashup” of Beethoven with African-American hymns that was shot, produced and edited by Davóne Tines at his hometown church in Warrenton, Virginia and presented virtually by the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale; EASTMAN, a micro-biographical film highlighting the life and work of composer Julius Eastman; and NATIVE SON, in which Tines sings the Black national anthem, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” and pays homage to the 1960s Civil Rights-era motto “I am a man.” The latter film was created for the fourth annual Native Son Awards, which celebrate Black, gay excellence. Further online highlights include appearances as part of Boston Lyric Opera’s new miniseries, desert in, marking his company debut; LA Opera at Home’s Living Room Recitals; and the 2020 NEA Human and Civil Rights Awards.
Notable performances on the opera stage include the world premiere performances of Kaija Saariaho’s Only the Sound Remains directed by Peter Sellars at Dutch National Opera, Finnish National Opera, Opéra national de Paris and Teatro Real (Madrid); the world and European premieres of John Adams and Peter Sellars’ Girls of the Golden West at San Francisco Opera and Dutch National Opera, respectively; the title role in new productions of Anthony Davis’ X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X with the Detroit Opera and Boston Modern Opera Project with Odyssey Opera in Boston, where it was recorded and subsequently released on BMOP/sound; the world premiere of Terence Blanchard and Kasi Lemmons’ Fire Shut Up In My Bones at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis; the world premiere of Matthew Aucoin’s Crossing, directed by Diane Paulus at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; a new production of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex at Lisbon’s Teatro Nacional de São Carlos led by Leo Hussain; and Handel’s rarely staged Aci, Galatea, e Polifemo at National Sawdust, presented in a new production by Christopher Alden.
Davóne Tines is co-creator and co-librettist of The Black Clown, a music theater experience inspired by Langston Hughes’ poem of the same name. The work, which was created in collaboration with director Zack Winokur and composer Michael Schachter, expresses a Black man’s resilience against America’s legacy of oppression—fusing vaudeville, opera, jazz and spirituals to bring Hughes’ verse to life onstage. The world premiere was given by the American Repertory Theater in 2018, and The Black Clown was presented by Lincoln Center in summer 2019.
His concert appearances have included John Adams’ El Niño with The Cleveland Orchestra conducted by the composer, and the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin led by Vladimir Jurowski, Schumann’s Das Paradies und die Peri with Louis Langrée and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Kaija Saariaho’s True Fire with the Orchestre national de France conducted by Olari Elts, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with Michael Tilson Thomas leading the San Francisco Symphony, Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Royal Swedish Orchestra, and a program spotlighting music of resistance by George Crumb, Julius Eastman, Dmitri Shostakovich and Caroline Shaw with conductor Christian Reif and members of the San Francisco Symphony at SoundBox. He also sang works by Caroline Shaw and Kaija Saariaho alongside the Calder Quartet and International Contemporary Ensemble at the Ojai Music Festival. In May 2021, Tines sang in Tulsa Opera’s concert Greenwood Overcomes, which honored the resilience of Black Tulsans and Black America 100 years after the Tulsa Race Massacre. That event featured Tines premiering “There are Many Trails of Tears,” an aria from Anthony Davis’ opera-in-progress Fire Across the Tracks: Tulsa 1921. With his AMOC* collaborators, he has performed in Hans Werner Henze’s El Cimarrón and Were You There by composers Matthew Aucoin and Michael Schachter, and he served as a co-music director of the 2022 Ojai Music Festival.
Davóne Tines is Musical America’s 2022 Vocalist of the Year. He is also a winner of the 2020 Sphinx Medal of Excellence, recognizing extraordinary classical musicians of color who, early in their career, demonstrate artistic excellence, outstanding work ethic, a spirit of determination, and an ongoing commitment to leadership and their communities. In 2019 he was named as one of Time Magazine’s Next Generation Leaders. He is also the recipient of the 2018 Emerging Artists Award given by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and is a graduate of The Juilliard School and Harvard University, where he teaches a semester-length course, “How to be a Tool: Storytelling Across Disciplines,” in collaboration with director Zack Winokur.
Photo Credit: Bowie Verschuuren