Acclaimed critic and author Alex Ross (Wagnerism, The Rest is Noise) has contributed a profile of bass-baritone Davóne Tines to the November 22 issue of The New Yorker.
Titled Davóne Tines Is Changing What It Means to Be a Classical Singer, the profile centers on Tines’s Recital No. 1: Mass, which he performs with pianist Lester Green on DACAMERA’s series on January 25 at the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts.
Beginning with a description of the recital, which includes spirituals and music by Bach, contemporary composers Caroline Shaw and Tyshawn Sorey and others, Ross writes, “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…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.”
Describing the first time he heard Tines perform, as a soloist in a Los Angeles Philharmonic performance of John Adams’s oratorio El Niño, Ross writes that it was “one of those moments which anyone who attends concerts lives to witness: within thirty seconds, I knew I was in the presence of a major artist.”
Read the full profile here. Purchase tickets for the Tuesday, January 25 performance.