![]() ![]() 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. 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. ![]() 1: mass,” in black letters on a white background. Before the altar of the church stood a large screen displaying the words “ recital no. ![]()
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