Three virtual walking tours from On Site Opera explore Black music and history in New York; the Tulsa Opera pays tribute in song to the centennial of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre
By Heidi Waleson
May 5, 2021 5:39 pm ET
New York
In normal times, On Site Opera stages works in locations that relate to their subject matter. With “The Road We Came,” an ambitious project designed for abnormal times, the company has instead used music and technology to illuminate the rich history that is buried in familiar places. Three self-guided walking tours trace the experience of Black people in New York, starting in Lower Manhattan in the 17th century; moving north to Midtown in the late 19th century; and then up to Harlem in the 20th century. Each of the 16 tour stops has a narration by historian Eric K. Washington and a short film by Ryan and Tonya McKinny in which bass-baritone Kenneth Overton, accompanied by pianist Kevin J. Miller, sings music by (mostly) Black composers. Accessed through a dedicated app, the tours are $60 each; all three are $165.
These fascinating journeys can be taken virtually or in person; I walked the Lower Manhattan route on a windy Friday afternoon. It’s a hike—3.1miles, according to the app—and it took two hours, rather than the estimated 90 minutes, to do the walk and take in all the filmed and recorded content at each of the five stops. The tour begins at the African Burial Ground on Duane Street, a somber monument in water and stone to the thousands buried there between the 1690s and 1794; Mr. Overton’s rendition of William Grant Still’s plaintive “Grief” is a fitting accompaniment. The next site, a plaque in Tribeca marking a stop on the Underground Railroad, gets a fiercer song: “Oh Say, Do You Hear? (Abolitionist National Anthem),” with E.A. Atlee’s graphic text about whipped and bloodied bodies set to the tune better known as “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
The tour continues north through Greenwich Village, zigzagging to Astor Place and into Chelsea. It was illuminating to learn about Henry and Sarah Garnet, a prominent Black abolitionist couple (he a minister and orator; she an educator), outside their house on MacDougal Street, and Mr. Overton’s haunting performance of Wallace Willis’s “Steal Away” stayed with me along the next leg of the walk. Who knew that the Wanamaker’s department store, which once stood opposite Cooper Union, had an all-black employee chorus? Or that Sarah Garnet’s three-story school, built in 1870, still stands on 17th Street, albeit with a peeling façade and gated windows? For this location, Mr. Overton, wearing one of many colorful, African-patterned jackets ( Jessica Jahn designed the costumes), stood like a greeter at its door, singing the spiritual “De Gospel Train” with its appropriate refrain, “Get on board, little children.”
I took the Midtown Manhattan tour virtually, losing the immediacy of those physical sites and the disturbing sense of how history gets paved over. On the plus side, it is easier to appreciate the films, as well as Mr. Washington’s absorbing commentaries, without the extraneous light and noise of the street. The tour explores the history of the vanished West Side Black neighborhoods, like San Juan Hill, along with the growth of mainstream audience interest in the work of Black performers, heard at Carnegie Hall, and in the Eubie Blake musical “Shuffle Along,” which opened in 1921. The most stirring moment is Mr. Overton’s performance—in front of the Metropolitan Opera House—of “Peculiar Grace,” from Terence Blanchard’s 2019 opera, “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.” This affecting aria depicts a gay Black boy’s yearning to leave his home in the South and be “finally free.” “Fire” is slated to open the Met’s 2021-22 season, its first-ever opera by a Black composer.
The Harlem tour, the most geographically compact, traces the flowering of the Harlem Renaissance with visits to landmarks like the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the house where Langston Hughes lived in his final decades. I was intrigued by the two row houses on West 131st Street which briefly (1914-19) served as the home for the Music School Settlement for Colored People: Its director of music was John Rosamond Johnson, who, with his brother, the poet James Weldon Johnson, wrote “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” often called the “Black National Anthem.” That piece was featured on the Midtown tour; here, Mr. Overton offered a quieter composition by the brothers, the soulful “Since You Went Away,” taking off his fedora, seemingly as a sign of mourning.
Hughes’s close collaboration with the composer Margaret Bonds is celebrated in the evocative “Three Dream Portraits”; Mr. Overton also performs striking settings of Hughes’s poems by Florence Price and William Grant Still. The tour concludes on Strivers’ Row, at the home of James H. Williams who, as “Chief” of the red cap porters of Grand Central Terminal, hired Black, college-educated men. Fittingly, the optimistic final piece, “Night Song,” with a text by the Harlem Renaissance poet Clarissa Scott Delany, is by H. Leslie Adams —a living composer.
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Tulsa Opera’s “Greenwood Overcomes,” a live concert with an in-person audience at the Tulsa Performing Arts Center, commemorating the centennial of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre by celebrating Black resilience and artistry, was a laudable undertaking. (The May 1 livestream is available through May 31 on the company’s site. A higher quality recording will be available May 19.) It featured music by 23 living Black composers, including eight world premieres, four of them commissioned for the event, performed by an all-Black cast of eight singers with piano accompaniment by the valiant Howard Watkins, who co-curated the project with the company’s artistic director, Tobias Picker.
While overlong at two hours, with 30 numbers and no intermission, the concert had numerous high points. My favorites were the two performances by the superb young bass-baritone Davóne Tines, arresting in “After Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”—Tyshawn Sorey’s chilling deconstruction of the spiritual, which stretches out the cadences of the familiar text and pares the accompaniment down to a death march. Mr. Tines also gave a storyteller’s intensity to the most gripping of the commissions: “There Are Many Trails of Tears” from Anthony Davis’s forthcoming opera “Fire Across the Tracks: Tulsa 1921.”
Also memorable was Issachah Savage, who channeled his lavish, buoyant tenor into directness and simplicity for H. Leslie Adams’s “Prayer,” and gave Nkeiru Okoye’s “A Kiss on the Forehead,” one of the world premieres, an easy, expansive sincerity. Leah Hawkins brought a rich soprano and considerable charm to “Liza” and “Nobody’s Business (But Me Own)” by Peter Ashbourne.
The sheer number and variety of composers was also impressive. I liked Quinn Mason’s dreamy “Eclipsed World,” sung by tenor Noah Stewart ; the serene lyricism of Kathryn Bostic’s “State of Grace,” sung by mezzo Krysty Swann ; and Melanie DeMore’s consoling “Sending You Light,” sung by mezzo Denyce Graves. Mr. Watkins got a solo moment in the spotlight with the poignant “Billie’s Song” by Valerie Capers. Not everything came off well: Bass Kevin Thompson seemed stiff and uncomfortable with the rhythms of Tania León’s lively “Mi Amor Es,” while James Lee III’s “Songs for the People,” another commissioned work, sung by Ms. Graves, had an old-fashioned vibe in both setting and text—a poem by Frances E.W. Harper about how the world needs music. It was also a miscalculation to have soprano Leona Mitchell, who was born in Oklahoma, sing four songs: Hearing what remains of her once-glorious soprano, now past its prime, was hard. Finally, most of the repertoire was chosen for uplift, which grew wearying in such a long program. Some more challenging fare would have been welcome in the mix.
—Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).
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