Ravinia 2021 - Issue 3

BOWIE VERSCHUUREN (TINES) DAVÓNE TINES, bass-baritone As a Black, gay, classically trained performer at the intersection of many histories, cultures, and aesthetics, Davóne Tines blends opera, art song, contemporary classical, spirituals, gospel, and songs of protest, as a means to tell a deeply personal story of perseverance that connects to all of humanity. He recently won the Sphinx Medal of Excellence, which recognizes extraordinary classical musicians of color, and he also 2018 Emerging Artists Award from Lincoln Center following his graduation from Harvard University and The Juilliard School. In addition to tonight’s program, Mass , Tines’s ongoing projects in- clude Vigil , a music film that pays tribute to Breonna Taylor, the EMT and aspiring nurse who was shot and killed by police in her Lou- isville home. With orchestration by Matthew Aucoin, he recently performed the work with the Louisville Orchestra under Teddy Abrams and the Philadelphia Orchestra under Yan- nick Nézet-Séguin. Tines is also co-creator of The Black Clown —a music theater expe- rience inspired by Langston Hughes’s poem of the same name—which animates a Black man’s resilience against America’s legacy of oppression by fusing vaudeville, opera, jazz, and spirituals. The piece was commissioned and premiered by the American Repertory Theater and was presented at Lincoln Cen- ter in 2019. As a founding core member of the American Modern Opera Company, he has been featured in productions of Henze’s El Cimarrón and John Adams’s Nativity Re- considered , as well as his original work with director Zack Winokur, Were You There , with music by Aucoin and Michael Schachter. Tines has premiered works by today’s leading composers and directors, including Terence Blanchard and Kasi Lemmons’s Fire Shut Up In My Bones at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis and John Adams and Peter Sellars’s Girls of the Golden West at San Francisco Opera and the Dutch National Opera. In concert, he has performed Adams’s El Niño with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, Kaija Saariaho’s True Fire with the French National Orches- tra, Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex with the Royal Swedish Orchestra, Beethoven’s Ninth Sym- phony with the San Francisco Symphony. Davóne Tines is making his Ravinia debut. ADAM NIELSEN, piano Pianist Adam Nielsen enjoys a diverse ca- reer as a soloist, collaborator, répétiteur, and coach. In recent seasons, his collaborations with baritone Steven LaBrie, bass-baritones Davóne Tines and Ryan Speedo Green, and mezzo-soprano Tamara Mumford have taken him to prominent venues across the United States, including Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, Alice Tully Hall, The Frick Collection, Ravinia Festival, Aspen Music Festival, the Heifetz Institute, the Vilar Center in Colora- do, and the Venetian Arts Society of Florida, as well as Chicago’s Dame Myra Hess Series and the Saint Louis Celebrity Series. Nielsen has appeared in concert with the Saint Lou- is Symphony, Utah Symphony, Stony Brook Symphony, the Fry Street Quartet, A Far Cry, and Windscape. His collaborators have also included sopranos Simone Osborne, Claire DeSevigne, and Ying Fang, as well as violin- ist Andres Cárdenes. Nielsen’s playing has been featured in the soundtracks of several films, including The Upside (STX/Lantern Entertainment), The Chaperone (PBS), and The French Dispatch (Wes Anderson). Earlier this year, he recorded solo works of Chopin and Glinka for an upcoming, yet-to-be-ti- tled Netflix film. In 2018, Nielsen joined the music staff of the Metropolitan Opera. As an opera pianist, he has contributed to works at Harvard’s American Repertory Theater, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Richard Tucker Foundation, Aspen Opera Theater, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, the Dallas Op- era, and Lyric Opera of Chicago. Since 2011, he has been a member of the Vocal Arts facul- ty at The Juilliard School, where he is current- ly Principal Coach and Music Advisor to the school’s master’s-level singers. Adam Nielsen was a collaborative pianist at the Ravinia Ste- ans Music Institute in 2011 and 2013–15, and he returned to the festival’s main stage in 2017 alongside Ryan Speedo Green. Recognizing an exceptional musical talent, Foss invited Eastman to join the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts (informally known as the Creative Associates) at the Uni- versity of Buffalo on September 1, 1969. Over the next few years, Eastman achieved an envi- able level of success as a composer, performer, and educator, but, by the middle of the de- cade, he had grown disillusioned with aca- deme and bored with the contemporary mu- sic scene in Buffalo. He had clearly reached a transitional point in his life and career, a time to affirm fundamental values and identities: “What I am trying to achieve is to be what I am to the fullest—Black to the fullest, a musi- cian to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest. It is important that I learn how to be, by that I mean accept everything about me.” Shortly thereafter, he moved to New York City and immersed himself in the music scene, which was heavily inclined toward musical Mini- malism and dominated by white artists. The multitalented Black and openly gay artist brought a breath of fresh air. In early 1981, Eastman composed The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc for a performance at The Kitchen on April 1–5. This composi- tion for 10 cellos embodied a compositional principle of Eastman’s invention—“organic music.” He explained this concept during a rather infamous performance at Northwest- ern University on January 16, 1980: “There’s an attempt to make every section contain all the information of the previous sections, or else, taking out information at a gradual and logical rate.” The Creative Music Foundation subsequently recorded The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc as part of a three-part radio series. In prepa- ration for the broadcast, Eastman recorded a spoken introduction (his letter to Joan of Arc—an exegesis on oppression, corruption, and emancipation—that was printed in the program for The Kitchen performance) and an extended improvisatory vocal prelude based on a text of his own creation. Eastman’s Prelude to ‘The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc’ consists of short phrases, 21 words total, that are repeated in the manner of an ecstatic prayer or litany. Eastman’s text Julius Eastman invokes St. Michael the Archangel, St. Cather- ine of Alexandria, and St. Margaret, the voic- es who spoke to Joan of Arc from age 13. As an improvisation, no musical score ever existed, only the broadcast recording. Davóne Tines has created his own transcription of Prelude to ‘The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc’ based on a transcription by Ben Skubi. IGEE DIEUDONNÉ & DAVÓNE TINES VIGIL Dutch freelance musician Igee Dieudonné and bass-baritone Davóne Tines found time in Amsterdam for after-hours improvisations on specific musical styles. Chorale resulted from an exploration of the melodic writing of Gabriel Fauré blended with gospel, contem- porary classical, and experimental pop music. “It was,” as Tines recalled, “a kind of transcen- dent moment.” Originally improvised by pia- no and voice, an entrancing version for harp and voice also exists. When the Los Angeles Opera invited Tines to make a video, he immediately thought of Chorale for a music film titled VIGIL in memory of Breonna Taylor. The film included images of vigils for both Taylor and George Floyd, interspersed with clips of Tines sing- ing. Prior to a second release by Lincoln Cen- ter for the Performing Arts on September 30, 2020, Tines completely reconceptualized the film, replacing the vigil images with simple sentences that constitute an embodiment ex- ercise, “to make people emotionally present with the tragedy they were engaging” in order to fuel change. VIGIL involved two additional collaborators: American composer, conductor, pianist, ar- ranger, and 2018 MacArthur Fellow Matthew Aucoin and pianist Conor Hanick (a North- western University alumnus). The Louisville Orchestra released a virtual performance of Aucoin’s orchestral arrangement of VIGIL on October 3, 2020. –Program notes © 2021 Todd E. Sullivan Igee Dieudonné RAVINIA MAGAZINE • AUGUST 18 – SEPTEMBER 6, 2021 50