Davóne Tines - Baritone
“In a just world, one in which fame was proportionate to talent, Davóne Tines would be as big a name as Kanye West” proclaimed KQED following concerts given with the San Francisco Symphony. Breakout performances were given on both sides of the Atlantic in 2015-16 when Davóne Tines made a Dutch National Opera debut in the premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s Only the Sound Remains directed by Peter Sellars. The bass-baritone was exalted by The Los Angeles Times as “the find of the season,” for performances of works by Caroline Shaw and Kaija Saariaho with the Calder Quartet and with members of ICE at the Ojai Music Festival.
Performances of 2018-19 include the world premiere of The Black Clown by composer Michael Schachter with a libretto adapted from the Langston Hughes poem by Davóne Tines and Michael Schachter; presented by the American Repertory Theater, The Black Clown – in a production directed by Zack Winokur – is a music theater experience that animates a black man’s resilience against America’s legacy of oppression by fusing vaudeville, opera, jazz, and spirituals to bring Hughes’ verse to life onstage. Kaija Saariaho’s Only the Sound Remains returns to Davóne Tines’ calendar in performances at the Teatro Real and Lincoln Center and John Adams’ El Niño serves his debut with Vladimir Jurowski conducting the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin. The artist reprises his acclaimed portrayal of Ned Peters in the European premiere of John Adams and Peter Sellars’ Girls of the Golden West at Dutch National Opera and he assays the title role of Henze’s El Cimarrón in a new production by Zack Winokur at the Metropolitan Museum of Arts in collaboration with the American Modern Opera Company. Davóne Tines makes a debut at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis in the world premiere of Fire Shut Up In My Bones by the creative team of Terance Blanchard and Kasi Lemmons and symphonic appearances of the season include concerts with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony, and Aram Demirjian leading the Kansas City Symphony.
Davóne Tines made a San Francisco Opera debut in 2017-18 in the world premiere of John Adams and Peter Sellars’ Girls of the Golden West, a debut at the Opéra national de Paris in Kaija Saariaho’s Only the Sound Remains directed by Peter Sellars, and a debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the role he originated in a production of Matthew Aucoin’s Crossing directed by multi Tony Award-winning director Diane Paulus. He bowed in performances of Handel’s rarely staged serenata, Aci, Galatea, e Polifemo at National Sawdust in a new production by Christopher Alden that examined parallels between an 18thcentury telling of Ovid’s mythological tale and our own contemporary aesthetic driven by power, class, race, and the cruelty of thwarted desire. Other appearances of the season included a debut at the Baltic Sea Festival in Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen and Coming Together by Frederic Rzewski and Schumann’s Das Paradies und die Peri, both under the baton of Gustavo Dudamel, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a fully-staged production by Peter Sellars.
Highlights of past seasons include John Adams’ El Niño under the composer’s baton with the London Symphony Orchestra in London and in Paris as well as with Grant Gershon conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Bruckner’s Te Deum with Christopher Warren-Green and the Charlotte Symphony, Kaija Saariaho’s True Fire with the Orchestre national de France, and a program exposing the 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. On the opera stage, Davóne Tines has debuted at Lisbon’s Teatro Nacional de São Carlos in a new production of Oedipus Rex led by Leo Hussain and at the Finnish National Opera in Only the Sound Remains directed by Peter Sellars.
Davóne Tines is a founding core member of the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC) and the recipient of the 2018 Emerging Artists Award given by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. He was graduated from Harvard University and received a Master of Music degree from The Juilliard School.