LATimes.com: Commentary: Julia Bullock and Davóne Tines are the must-hear singers of opera today

Julia Bullock

(Jason Armond, Los Angeles Times)

Los Angeles Times

By Mark Swed Classical Music Critic 

Sep. 9, 2021

Soprano Julia Bullock included composer Margaret Bonds’ 1942 song “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in her appearance last week with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl. She delivered a Langston Hughes line, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers,” and it’s not enough to say she sang the soulful song with soul. In her delivery, she went deeper than mere rivers. She dove down into the darkest, most mysterious depths of an ocean-deep soul.

Then this Wednesday, the bass-baritone Davóne Tines included Bonds’ 1925 song “A Brown Girl Dead” in his “Recital No. 1: MASS” at First Congregational Church of Los Angeles. The first of the song’s two stanzas ends, “Death has found her sweet.” Tines wavered on “sweet,” taking all the sugar out of it, ounce by profoundly moving ounce.

In one sense little might seem comparable between Bullock at the Bowl and Tines at First Congregational. Bullock was but part of a program of music by Gershwin and three neglected Black American composers — Bonds, Ulysses Kay and William Grant Still — conducted by Thomas Wilkins. Bullock’s contribution was but five Gershwin and Bonds songs. Elsewhere the program included such popular Gershwin favorites as Robert Russell Bennett’s arrangement of excerpts from “Porgy and Bess” in a “Symphonic Picture” and Variations on “I Got Rhythm” for piano and orchestra that got canceled when the soloist Aaron Diehl had to leave the stage shortly after beginning because he didn’t feel well.

Tines, on the other hand, crafted his “MASS” recital, with pianist Adam Nielsen, as what the singer called a “queering” of the conventional mass. Queering meant the broadest sense of expansion, be it reflection of sexual orientation, of African American tradition or of our relevant present-day spiritual concerns.

Davone Tines

(Anneliese Varaldiev)

With new meditative solo settings of the traditional Latin Mass written for the project by Caroline Shaw, Tines wove Bach, Bonds, Julius Eastman, the percussionist-composer Tyshawn Sorey and spirituals into a newly ordered Kyrie, Agnus Dei, Credo, Gloria, Sanctus and Benedictus. The progress over 50 minutes was from death to life, from dark to light, from heavy to light. This was a solemn, spiritual new music event presented by the Monday Evening Concerts, which has just announced Tines as the long-standing series’ first artist-in-residence.

At the Bowl, the audience picnicked and Bullock was blown up on the big screens aside the famed shell. Tines had the sacred space of a famed old L.A. church. But the differences as experiences weren’t big. It has been increasingly evident that Bullock and Tines are the two singers who can most promisingly bring something powerful, meaningful and even existential to opera.