Davóne Tines collaborates with Jennifer Koh at BAM in a performance that delves into both artists’ life stories, and with Tyshawn Sorey at the Park Avenue Armory commemorating the 50th anniversary of Morton Feldman’s tribute to Rothko Chapel.
Davóne Tines and Jennifer Koh in ‘Everything Rises’ at BAM
PHOTO: ELLEN QBERTPLAYA/BAM
By Heidi Waleson
Oct. 18, 2022 5:17 pm
Brooklyn, N.Y.
“Everything Rises,” a 70 minute-long work presented at BAM Fisher recently, tackles complex issues in an extremely personal way. Opera singer Davóne Tines, who is black, and violinist Jennifer Koh, who is Korean-American, both highly successful performers of Western classical music, bonded over their feelings of estrangement from its historically white culture. Efforts to diversify notwithstanding, that whiteness remains dominant—in the repertoire, the performers, the presenting institutions, and, perhaps most critically, the audience that buys the tickets. To survive within it, Mr. Tines and Ms. Koh feel pressure to mask their true selves, or “code-switch.” In “Everything Rises,” they shed the masks while still embracing the music that they love.
The piece has an all-BIPOC creative team—Ken Ueno, music and libretto; Kee-Yoon Nahm, narrative structure and dramaturgy; Alexander Gedeon, director; Hana S. Kim, projection and set designer; Carolina Ortiz Herrera, lighting designer; Lena Sands, costume designer—and much of the text is adapted from interviews with the two performers about their feelings and experiences. The tightly structured and thoughtfully produced show begins with an archival video: the 17-year-old Ms. Koh in her triumphant 1994 Tchaikovsky Competition concerto performance, embodying the stereotype of the over-achieving young Asian musician. Then Mr. Tines and Ms. Koh enter. They seem trussed in their formal concert wear, and Mr. Tines, in the lowest, gravelly depths of his voice, accompanied only by a recorded drone, addresses the “dear white people” for whom “I’m just a thing / a Ming vase, a Picasso / you bought and sold me,” as well as his self-hatred for wanting that “money, access, fame.” This disturbingly frank and naked moment is followed by Ms. Koh’s violin solo, which scratches and shrieks her inner anguish behind the mask.
The rest of “Everything Rises” explores the two artists’ family histories, deftly alternating live performance and recorded audio recollections from Alma Lee Gibbs Tines (Mr. Tines’s grandmother) and Gertrude Soonja Lee Koh (Ms. Koh’s mother), who also appear on silent video. The matriarchs speak with the toughness of survivors—one a descendant of enslaved people, recounting stories of lynchings and violence; the other a Korean War refugee and solitary young immigrant to the U.S., driven to succeed through assimilation. Mr. Tines and Ms. Koh, having changed into elegant matching long black skirts, riff seamlessly on these narratives. In “Fluttering Heart,” for example, Mr. Tines transforms Soonja’s words into a meditative lullaby about loneliness—she laughs, but he sings the painful subtext, and then Ms. Koh plays it.
Trees—“the tree of humanity”—are a pervasive symbol. Broken branches in the video, an arched piece of driftwood carried by Mr. Tines, even Ms. Koh’s wooden violin—reaching their apogee in the penultimate song, the Billie Holiday classic “Strange Fruit.” Mr. Tines sings that harrowing depiction of lynched bodies in a new version, with its text and melody rearranged and stretched, as Ms. Koh plays while lying flat on her back on the floor, against a background of abstract but ominous video images. The final song, “Better Angels,” offers a positive answer to the earlier question, “To whom does the music belong?”—suggesting it as “a language in which you and I are the same.”
The most moving aspect of the piece is the potent musical connection of these two superb performers: It gives them the strength to express their buried histories and traumas, using their artistic virtuosity, for an audience that is accustomed to seeing them in a different guise. Both are practiced at breaking new ground within the classical world: Ms. Koh is spearheading The New American Concerto, a commissioning project; Mr. Tines will perform his “Recital No. 1: Mass,” a program that weaves movements of a Latin Mass by Caroline Shaw together with music by Bach, Julius Eastman and others, at Carnegie Hall on Nov. 3, in Baltimore on Nov. 6 and in Philadelphia on Nov. 30. Mr. Tines will also be artist-in-residence at BAM in 2023. Yet the explicitly personal nature of “Everything Rises” demands that we see them unmasked and welcome their full experience as part of the canon.
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New York
Davóne Tines played a central role in another unconventional music event earlier this month: “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)” at the Park Avenue Armory. The piece, by Tyshawn Sorey, was commissioned for the 50th anniversary of Houston’s Rothko Chapel. Inspired by Morton Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel” (1971), it is an eloquently spare work, with questioning fragments of melody left hanging in the air, the spaces between them as important as the notes themselves, inviting the listener to find their own meaning.
The Armory version, staged by Peter Sellars, was given a grander and gaudier vibe than the octagon of black Rothko canvases could possibly provide. On a raised platform, eight giant images of abstract paintings by Julie Mehretu encircled the audience; Mr. Sorey and the instrumental ensemble (Kim Kashkashian, viola; Sarah Rothenberg, piano/celesta; Steven Schick, percussion) were placed at the center. The Choir of Trinity Wall Street, singing wordless syllables, was barely visible, and when Mr. Tines, who sat in the audience for the beginning of the work, stood and sang his booming first notes, the people just in front of him were clearly startled. Mark Urselli’s sound design made this all seem perfectly natural.
Mr. Tines’s fragments were from the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” and Mr. Sellars had him journey slowly around the space, first to the musicians, then up and around the platform. The paintings seemed alive, their smudged backgrounds and flicked lines of color transformed over time by James F. Ingalls’s protean lighting. Each painting had a human animator as well: a dancer performing flexn choreography by Reggie (Regg Roc) Gray. Their contortions could be distracting—the dancer with seemingly double-jointed shoulders was hard to watch. But as Mr. Tines made his way back to the musicians and hummed the end of his melody along with the viola, the meditative, lost-in-the-darkness atmosphere of the piece seemed to resolve into a welcome homecoming.
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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