Standing ovations at performances get handed out like Halloween candy,
a reflexive exercise that shows how the over-liking of anything has
long since become the norm.
On the rural outskirts of Ojai one
Saturday morning in June, an audience of 230, crammed into tiny Zalk
Theater, rose as one. But this response felt different, real. And then
surreal.
Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw, whose song
“By and By” had just been performed, cut through the applause as, tears
streaming down her face, she emerged from the seats and flung herself
onto the small stage, prostrate at the feet of the singer, Davóne Tines.
A
couple of hours later and a few miles away at Libbey Bowl, where larger
crowds at the 70th Ojai Music Festival had assembled for the afternoon
program, buzz was building. Something special had happened that morning.
“Everyone was talking about it,” said Tom Morris, artistic director of the festival.
The
word spread through the crowd: A striking, young singer had emerged
through a sun-drenched opening at the back of the darkened theater,
planted himself amid the Calder Quartet and delivered a soulful
rendition of a plaintive song. Most compelling, Tines’ rich bass-baritone somehow ranged up to an equally resonant falsetto.
Reflecting later, Peter Sellars, music director of the festival and
the man who had organized the performance, had an assessment:
“You
know, nobody, ever, ever forgets that astonishing moment when there is
someone new on the scene and we feel in a moment they are not just
entering the scene, but can be part of shaping it.
“You could feel that so powerfully. Just exhilarating.”
Tines
went on to sing a deliberate, powerful reading of Kaija Saariaho’s
“Sombre,” and at a free street party concert closing the festival in
nearby Santa Paula he soloed stirring spirituals to a rapt audience near
a Goodwill storefront.
Now Tines, 29, is lined up to be in composer John Adams’ “El Niño,” set for Dec. 16 and 18 at
Walt Disney Concert Hall with Grant Gershon leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
For many in the audience, the question likely will be: Who is this guy?
Davóne Tines was born in 1986 in rural Virginia — “horse country,”
he describes it — and grew up largely in Orlean, an unincorporated
village small enough to be uncounted in the
2010 census. It lies about 50 miles east of Washington, D.C.
Tines began playing violin at 7. He put the instrument aside three years ago, explaining why during a recent interview.
“Like
a lot of things, I think I thought about the violin too much and
overprepared,” he said. “This is a little bit of a blessing and a
curse.”
The discovery that he might be a singer came from his
grandfather, John Hilton Tines Sr., a Navy officer for about 30 years
who also ran three church choirs.
“He came to the house when I was
young and would pronounce with operatic enunciation: ‘Howww arrre
youuu?’’’ Tines recalled. “On one occasion I responded in kind, ‘Iii
ammm fiiine.’ He peered down and said he thought I had a voice.”
As Tines started to sing in African American church and high school choirs, further musical connections were forged.
“What
struck me was the happiness I felt in encountering gospel or church
music I would then find that same feeling inside a Mendelssohn piece or a
chord structure in Beethoven,” Tines said. “Not the same kinds of
music, structurally, but they would appeal to me not just
intellectually, but emotionally.
“‘Soulful aspects,’ I would say.”
Jump ahead to Harvard: He continued with the violin, explored fashion design and served as president of Harvard’s orchestra.
A
younger classmate noticed. Matthew Aucoin, then a freshman and now a
composer and conductor, was struck by “not just his voice of enviable
lushness and uncanny power but all the things he was undertaking.”
Aucoin,
now Los Angeles Opera’s first artist in residence, views it as Tines
“drawing on every aspect of his intelligence and his experience when he
sings.”
Sellars initially encountered Tines at Juilliard, where he earned a master’s degree in music in 2013.
“I
am always interested in working with young singers that are emerging,
and Juilliard had arranged auditions for us,” Sellars said. “He sang a
spiritual” — Sellars burst out with a trademark gust of laughter at the
recollection — “that I will never forget! It went on for 15 minutes. It
was truly overwhelming.”
For Aucoin, who created the role of the
escaped slave Freddie for Tines in the well-received 2015 opera
“Crossing,” the singer’s range is a huge slate on which to compose.
“I
was able to write music both at the very bottom of the bass range and
waaaay up in the falsetto range — we’re talking countertenor territory,”
Aucoin said. “But when Davóne sings at these extremes, it’s not
grotesque. The bottom is rich and resonant, and his falsetto is like an
instrument-within-his-instrument, with its own beauty and penetrative
power.”
Sellars believes Tines’ vocal prowess derives from his background and experience.
“I
think what you are hearing there is deeply within the tradition of the
black church, where you have to go way down and way up,” he said. “And
that poses a spiritual question as well as a vocal question, something
that is conveying the range of the human soul.”
Tines finds his singing perhaps at its most engaged in making new music.
“It’s
not exactly new music that I love, but it’s the act of creating
something with explicit context. New music projects tend toward explicit
relevance because of their very nature; the composer, the director, the
organizations that mount the work are motivated by clear and present
impetus which makes my role of being a vessel delivering this amassed
energy crazy thrilling.”
Tines is anticipating some crazy thrilling in Adams’ “El Niño.”
“The
Christian basis of the piece taps into my background, and the
explorations about these themes are ones I am drawn to, plus I can rock
out to shake the heavens, some of the coolest orchestral rock songs ever
written,” he said.
Tines
will again sing Adams, with Sellars writing the libretto and directing,
in a world premiere at San Francisco Opera next year. Called “Girls of
the Golden West,” the work in part references Puccini’s “The Girl of the
Golden West” but will be a deeper exploration of California’s
roots that, Sellars feels, haven’t been adequately communicated before.
Adams wrote music for, and in response to, Tines’ voice.
Sellars marvels at the journey of a performer who has not reached 30.
