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Davóne Tines
Artist Mentor

Davóne Tines, heralded as an artist "changing what it means to be a classical singer (The New Yorker) and “[one] of the most powerful voices of our time” (Los Angeles Times), is a pathbreaking artist whose work encompasses a diverse repertoire, ranging from early music to new commissions by leading composers, while exploring the social issues of today. A creator, curator, and performer at the intersection of many histories, cultures, and aesthetics, he is engaged in work that blends opera, art song, spirituals, contemporary classical, gospel, and protest songs as a means to tell a deeply personal story of perseverance connecting to all of humanity.

Tines’s first studio album, ROBESOИ, is released on Nonesuch Records in September 2024. Through a diverse set of repertoire ranging from classical and gospel to Broadway and Black folk music, Tines explores his connection to legendary American baritone Paul Robeson, reimagining some of the music Robeson famously sang. Tines and his band THE TRUTH premiered ROBESOИ live at Little Island in New York City in the summer of 2024, with the Los Angeles and Chicago premieres taking place in the fall. Also in the 2024-2025 season, Tines appears with acclaimed Boston-based chamber orchestra A Far Cry in their program CODED, on which he performs spirituals by Harry Burleigh and Songs of Death, a new work by Tines’s frequent collaborator, Pulitzer Prize winner and MacArthur 'genius' grant recipient Tyshawn Sorey.

Tines is a musician who takes full agency of his work, devising new programs and pieces from conception to performance. He reflects this ethos in his Recital No. 1: MASS, an examination of the liturgy, comparing Western European, African American, and 21st Century traditions to lay bare commonalities at the heart of our shared spiritual journeys. The program features works by J.S. Bach, Margaret Bonds, Moses Hogan, Julius Eastman, Caroline Shaw, Tyshawn Sorey, as well as Tines. This season, he performs a newly orchestrated version of the recital with the New World Symphony, conducted by Stéphane Denève. He has previously performed the recital at Carnegie Hall, Caramoor, the Barbican and Bold Tendencies in London, Baltimore’s Shriver Hall, for the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, as part of Boston’s Celebrity Series, and in Montreal, Chicago, Princeton, and the Netherlands.

In a similar artistic endeavor to his Recital No. 1: MASS, Tines has created two concertos for voice and orchestra. Concerto No. 1: SERMON combines pieces including John Adams’ El Niño; Vigil, written by Tines and Igée Dieudonné with orchestration by Matthew Aucoin; “You Want the Truth, but You Don’t Want to Know,” from Anthony Davis’ X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X; and poems from Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Maya Angelou into a concert performance. Tines has performed Concerto No. 1: SERMON with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra and with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Concerto No. 2: ANTHEM is an examination of nationhood and our collective visions of America. The work opens with “The Star-Spangled Banner” including its lesser-known verses, in a new arrangement by Michael Schachter, followed by texts by poet Mahogany L. Browne and new works by Tines' frequent collaborators, Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Shaw and Tyshawn Sorey. The concerto closes with the Black National Anthem “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” also in a new arrangement by Tines and Schachter. Tines premiered Concerto No. 2: ANTHEM with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl in 2022. 

Tines recently made a number of important debuts at prominent New York institutions, including the Metropolitan Opera, Park Avenue Armory, New York Philharmonic, BAM, and Carnegie Hall, continuing to establish a strong presence in the city’s classical scene. He starred in the fully staged opera-oratorio production of John Adams’s El Niño at the Met Opera, and subsequently performs in El Niño — Nativity Reconsidered, an arrangement of the work, in cities across the U.S. including at The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York. He performed the New York premiere of Tyshawn Sorey’s Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) at the Park Avenue Armory in a solo part written specifically for him by Sorey, marking a third collaboration between the pair. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tines recently participated in the world premiere of Terrance McKnight’s Handel: Made in America. 

Tines also performed Everything Rises, an original, evening length staged musical work he created with violinist Jennifer Koh, which premiered in New York as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival. Everything Rises tells the story of Tines’ and Koh’s artistic journeys and family histories through music, projections, and recorded interviews. As a platform, it also centers the need for artists of color to be seen and heard. The world premiere of Everything Rises premiered in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles in April 2022, with the LA Times commenting, “Koh and Tines’ stories have made them what they are, but their art needs to be—and is—great enough to tell us who they are.” He made his New York Philharmonic debut performing in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, led by Jaap van Zweden, and his Carnegie Hall recital debut performing Recital No. 1: MASS. 

Going beyond the concert hall, Tines also creates short music films that use powerful visuals to accentuate the social and poetic dimensions of the music. In September 2020, Lincoln Center presented his music film VIGIL, which pays tribute to Breonna Taylor, the EMT and aspiring nurse who was shot and killed by police in her Louisville home, and whose tragic death has fueled an international outcry. Created in collaboration with Igée Dieudonné, and Conor Hanick, the work was subsequently arranged for orchestra by Matthew Aucoin and premiered in a live-stream by Tines and the Louisville Orchestra, conducted by Teddy Abrams. Aucoin’s orchestration is also currently part of Tines’ Concerto No. 1: SERMON. He also co-created Strange Fruit with Jennifer Koh, a film juxtaposing violence against Asian Americans with Ken Ueno’s arrangement of “Strange Fruit” — which the duo perform in Everything Rises — directed by dramaturg Kee-Yoon Nahm. The work premiered virtually as part of Carnegie Hall’s “Voices of Hope Series.” Additional music films include FREUDE, an acapella “mashup” of Beethoven with African-American hymns that was shot, produced, and edited by Davóne Tines at his hometown church in Warrenton, Virginia and presented virtually by the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale; EASTMAN, a micro-biographical film highlighting the life and work of composer Julius Eastman; and NATIVE SON, in which Tines sings the Black national anthem, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” and pays homage to the ’60s Civil Rights-era motto “I am a man.” The latter film was created for the fourth annual Native Son Awards, which celebrate Black, gay excellence. Further online highlights include appearances as part of Boston Lyric Opera’s new miniseries, desert in, marking his company debut; LA Opera at Home’s Living Room Recitals; and the 2020 NEA Human and Civil Rights Awards.

Notable performances on the opera stage include the world premiere performances of Kaija Saariaho’s Only the Sound Remains directed by Peter Sellars at Dutch National Opera, Finnish National Opera, Opéra national de Paris, and Teatro Real (Madrid); John Cage’s Europeras 3 & 4 with Detroit Opera directed by Yuval Sharon; the world and European premieres of John Adams and Peter Sellars’ Girls of the Golden West at San Francisco Opera and Dutch National Opera, respectively; the title role in new productions of Anthony Davis’ X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X with the Detroit Opera and Boston Modern Opera Project with Odyssey Opera in Boston, where it was recorded and subsequently released on BMOPSound; the world premiere of Terence Blanchard and Kasi Lemmons’ Fire Shut Up In My Bones at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis; the world premiere of Matthew Aucoin’s Crossing, directed by Diane Paulus at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; a new production of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex at Lisbon’s Teatro Nacional de São Carlos led by Leo Hussain; and Handel’s rarely staged Aci, Galatea, e Polifemo at National Sawdust, presented in a new production by Christopher Alden. 

Davóne Tines is co-creator and co-librettist of The Black Clown, a music theater experience inspired by Langston Hughes’ poem of the same name. The work, which was created in collaboration with director Zack Winokur and composer Michael Schachter, expresses a Black man’s resilience against America’s legacy of oppression—fusing vaudeville, opera, jazz, and spirituals to bring Hughes’ verse to life onstage. The world premiere was given by the American Repertory Theater in 2018, and The Black Clown was presented by Lincoln Center in summer 2019. 

His concert appearances have included John Adams’ El Niño with Cleveland Orchestra conducted by the composer, the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin led by Vladimir Jurowski, and the Houston Symphony conducted by David Robertson; Schumann’s Das Paradies und die Peri with Louis Langrée and the Cincinnati Symphony; the role of Jesus in J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion with the New York Philharmonic under Jaap van Zweden; Kaija Saariaho’s True Fire with the Orchestre national de France conducted by Olari Elts; Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with Michael Tilson Thomas leading the San Francisco Symphony and the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ludovic Morlot; Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Royal Swedish Orchestra; and a program spotlighting music of resistance by George Crumb, Julius Eastman, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Caroline Shaw with conductor Christian Reif and members of the San Francisco Symphony at SoundBox. He also sang works by Caroline Shaw and Kaija Saariaho alongside the Calder Quartet and International Contemporary Ensemble at the Ojai Music Festival. In May 2021, Tines sang in Tulsa Opera’s concert Greenwood Overcomes, which honored the resilience of Black Tulsans and Black America one hundred years after the Tulsa Race Massacre. That event featured Tines premiering “There are Many Trails of Tears,” an aria from Anthony Davis’ opera-in-progress Fire Across the Tracks: Tulsa 1921. With his AMOC* collaborators he has performed in Hans Werner Henze’s El Cimarrón and Were You There by composers Matthew Aucoin and Michael Schachter, and he served as a co-music director of the 2022 Ojai Music Festival. 

Davóne Tines is Musical America’s 2022 Vocalist of the Year. He is Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Artist-in-Residence and Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale’s first-ever Creative Partner, taking part in strategic planning, programming, and working within the community. He is also a winner of the 2020 Sphinx Medal of Excellence, recognizing extraordinary classical musicians of color who, early in their career, demonstrate artistic excellence, outstanding work ethic, a spirit of determination, and an ongoing commitment to leadership and their communities. In 2019 he was named as one of Time Magazine’s Next Generation Leaders. He is also the recipient of the 2018 Emerging Artists Award given by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and is a graduate of The Juilliard School and Harvard University, where he teaches a semester-length course “How to be a Tool: Storytelling Across Disciplines” in collaboration with director Zack Winokur.