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    Review: Davóne Tines Hones the Recital Form to a Fine Point

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    This bass-baritone made his Carnegie Hall debut with his carefully curated, personal “Recital No. 1: MASS.”No one could accuse Davóne Tines of lacking ambition.On Thursday night, this bass-baritone made his Carnegie Hall debut in the intimate Weill Recital Hall, presenting a highly personal, carefully curated program with the pianist Adam Nielsen called “Recital No. 1: MASS.”Touching on Bach, spirituals and contemporary art music, the concert was a compelling reconceptualization of the recital format from an artist who molded his warm, strong voice like clay in a bracingly vulnerable, honest performance.In 2019, Tines’s “The Black Clown” landed in New York’s classical music scene like a fireball. Created with the composer Michael Schachter, that show traced the social, political and musical histories of Black Americans with grace, wit, resilience and ferocity. It took them seven years to develop it, and it remains one of my favorite theatrical experiences of the past decade.My subsequent live encounters with Tines have been comparatively disappointing. “Eastman,” at Little Island in 2021, felt impenetrable and unfinished. In September, Tines starred in Peter Sellars’s production of Tyshawn Sorey’s inert chamber work “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)” at Park Avenue Armory, and in October, the Brooklyn Academy of Music presented “Everything Rises,” in which he and the violinist Jennifer Koh shared their experiences as people of color in the classical industry. Their grievances, sincerely felt but guardedly expressed, couldn’t compete with the genuineness of Tines’s grandmother and Koh’s mother, who stole the show in filmed oral histories projected above the stage.“Recital No. 1: MASS,” which Tines has toured before its arrival in New York, demonstrates what happens when he hones a concept to a fine point. He starts with the idea that religious faith has common impetuses — a plea for mercy, a call to praise, a desire for salvation — that have found expression in various musical traditions across centuries.Tines restructured the Latin mass familiar from Bach and Haydn, beginning, as usual, with the Kyrie but ending with the Benedictus. Caroline Shaw set the Latin text for each movement in brief, deferential ways that clearly signposted each section. Filling that framework, Tines elided spirituals, Bach arias and pieces by 20th-century Black composers into an hourlong monologue. Throughout, soul-searching questions were projected on the wall behind him.The uninterrupted format may have frayed his voice, and a stubborn nasality crept into his otherwise handsome, hearty sound, but the program nevertheless accumulated in power.Sorey’s rewritings of the spirituals “Were You There?” (a slow, dark, pained sequence of chords) and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” (a minor-key, pessimistic realization) echoed Tines’s observation in the program book that many spirituals are about suicide or a will to death. Sorey’s pieces gave new context to a traditional arrangement of “Give Me Jesus,” revealing worlds of hurt and hope in its seemingly simple repetitions. Uplifting and glorious, with bittersweet blue notes and a swing buoyed by faith alone, Tines took us to church with it, prompting at least one “Hallelujah” from the audience.Tines’s personal way with a Bach cantata existed somewhere between stately Baroque chromaticism and churning gospel melisma, but it was a distinct pleasure to hear such a rich voice nestle into the bass writing for “Mache dich, mein Herze, rein” from Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” despite Nielsen’s pedal-heavy, bizarrely Chopinesque accompaniment.The program closed with bravura improvisation: Julius Eastman’s Prelude to “The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc” and “Vigil,” a piece Tines wrote with Igee Dieudonné then transformed into an extemporaneous Baptist sermon. He commanded attention in Prelude, a modern affirmation of faith written by a gay Black man in 1981 about a 15th-century martyr, after including it in “Eastman” last year.At Weill, it emerged with earth-rumbling intensity, as Tines wrapped his luscious voice around its punishing declamations with athletic fervor. Tines’s artistic process may be a personal one, but it is already reverberating through at least one of classical music’s hallowed halls.Recital No. 1: MASSPerformed on Thursday at Weill Recital Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Review: Dimming the Lights for Sensuously Flowing Bach

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      The harpsichordist Jean Rondeau played the “Goldberg” Variations at Weill Recital Hall with patience and a vibrant yet subtle touch.A quiet battle over lighting simmers in classical music. During concerts, halls tend to be kept bright enough for audience members to be able to find their cough drops and consult their programs. But where’s the focus and drama in that? The brightness can come across as stilted and bland compared with what it’s like at a movie or play. But the lights have stayed, mostly, on.For his return to Carnegie Hall on Thursday evening, though, the superb harpsichordist Jean Rondeau turned them off.He made Weill Recital Hall, the most intimate of Carnegie’s three spaces, unusually dark for his performance of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations. The only illumination was a dim spot on him and his instrument. The effect was nocturnal, even séance-like, adding extra dreaminess to his brief improvisation at the start that flowed into the familiar opening of Bach’s gentle Aria.Despite the dramatic lighting and that surprising prelude, this “Goldbergs” avoided attention-grabbing thrills. Rondeau, 31, is not an artist of stark contrasts or broad colors. His theatricality is patient and natural; his touch is vibrant but subtle.This rendition of the “Goldbergs” — Bach’s set of 30 variations on that Aria — was not the kind to exaggerate or even emphasize the, well, variation. (Mahan Esfahani, another leading harpsichordist of the younger generation, does that vividly on his 2016 recording.) Rondeau’s version more takes the form of an unfurling carpet: variety in its pattern, but one long piece of fabric.This impression of sustaining a single arc is all the more remarkable given the considerable length of his rendition. His performance of the “Goldbergs” on Thursday had roughly the same dimensions as the 106-minute recording he released earlier this year — of a piece that often runs half an hour shorter than that.Rondeau gets to that duration by opening up small pauses and spaces for breath and ornamentation, gradually increasing the run time without (usually) taking tempos that come off as unduly slow.The result isn’t lugubrious on the album, and it isn’t in performance, either. Rondeau’s Bach is a voyage taken with sensual but serene, silvery lightness of texture and moment-by-moment flexibility, though it took some time on Thursday to acclimate to what, over the first half-hour or so, seemed almost homogeneous.But by the ardent legato flow of his 13th Variation — a steadily unwinding lyricism made possible by the precision of his technique — the accumulating power of the interpretation was clear. Even with a substantial pause between the 17th and 18th variations, Rondeau maintained a sinuous connection between the tension of the harmonic wanderings in the first and the strumming release of the second.In the 20th, the clarity of his finger work allowed him to bend, shape and blur the meter without losing the pulse. He refused to milk the melancholy of the sprawling 25th, maintaining an elegant restraint that coursed into the virtuosic combination of courtliness and dense, smoky chromatic fireworks in the late variations.The return of the Aria after this odyssey was hardly a safe, secure homecoming. Rondeau ornamented it so elaborately — though, still, so unshowily — that it felt like yet another variation. Another stop on an ongoing journey, not the end.Jean RondeauPerformed on Thursday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More