A Pathbreaking Singer Arrives at the Met, With Pearls and Tattoos

The bass-baritone Davóne Tines at the Metropolitan Opera House, where he is making his debut in John Adams’s “El Niño” this month.

The bass-baritone Dav­óne Tines, wearing Dr. Martens boots, a sleeveless black shirt and six vintage pearl rings, stood on a rehearsal stage at the Metropolitan Opera in Manhattan the other day and began to sing.

“My soul’s above the sea and whistling a dream,” he sang, a passage from the Nativity oratorio “El Niño” by John Adams, in which Tines makes his Met debut this month. “Tell the shepherds the wind is saddling its horse.”

Tines, 37, known for his raw intensity and thundering voice, has quickly become one of classical music’s brightest stars. He has won acclaim for performances of Bach, Handel and Stravinsky, and he has helped champion new music, originating roles in operas like Adams’s “Girls of the Golden West” and Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.”

Tines has also used his art to confront social problems, including racism and police brutality. In 2018, he was a creator of and starred in “The Black Clown,” a searing rumination on Black history and identity inspired by a Langston Hughes poem. In 2020, he released a music video after the police killing of Breonna Taylor, calling for empathy and action.

During a rehearsal break at the Met, he described his art as cathartic, saying his aim was to “pick apart the complicated, contentious existence that is knit into the American landscape.”

“It’s a blessing to be a performing artist because you get an explicit place to put your feelings,” he said. “It’s the blessing of having a channel.”

Those feelings are expressed in a voice that is “not only low, but profound,” said the theater director Peter Sellars, who helped start Tines’s career in 2014 when he cast him in the chamber opera “Only the Sound Remains,” with music by Kaija Saariaho. “He really goes to very extreme and intense places,” Sellars said. “The performance is not just nice, it’s not just acceptable, it’s not just neat and well done. It has the quality that we’re present for an occasion.”

Through his wide-ranging work, Tines has helped to upend traditions in classical music. He has torn up the typical recital format, presenting deeply personal, carefully curated programs instead. He has embraced a wide variety of genres, moving freely from Bach cantatas to Black spirituals to minimalist music and gospel.

And Tines, at nearly 6 feet 3 inches with a muscular build, has challenged notions of what a classical star should look like. He wore a sleeveless all-white robe dress and Prada boots for the role of Jesus in Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” with the New York Philharmonic last year. (“Jesus should wear Prada,” he wrote on Instagram.) At the Grammys, he wore a sweater-dress inspired by his grandmother and decorated his shoes with earrings, as she often did before going to church.

As a gay Black man from Northern Virginia, Tines said he has often felt like an outsider. At a Lincoln Center cafe, he looked across the street to the Juilliard School, his alma mater. He began to recount his struggles there, describing how he felt misunderstood by teachers and colleagues because he could not relate to the standard vocal repertoire.

“I had to find my own path,” he said. “I had to find myself in other ways.”

Tines grew up in Fauquier County, Va., about an hour and a half outside of Washington, where his family has lived for generations. As a child, he was acutely aware of the racial and economic divisions in his hometown; he once said he “grew up in a Ralph Lauren ad on slave burial ground.” He was raised primarily by his grandparents. (His grandmother still calls at least twice a day.)

Julia Bullock with Tines, rehearsing “El Niño” at the Met.

He grew up singing at a Baptist church in Orlean, Va. His grandfather, who served in the military and rose to become a chief warrant officer at the Pentagon, had served as music director at several churches in the area. But Tines’s real passion was for the violin, which he played in youth ensembles, rising to the rank of concertmaster. His grandparents encouraged him to give singing a try, and in high school he won leading roles in productions of “Ragtime” and “Les Misérables.”

He went to college at Harvard, where he studied sociology. It was not until his senior year, when he took part in a production of Stravinsky’s opera “The Rake’s Progress,” that he began to think more seriously about opera.

At Juilliard, where he enrolled for graduate studies, he said he felt dehumanized because people were seen “for what they can do, as opposed to who they are.” He also felt a disconnect with the core repertoire — works like Schubert’s “Winterreise,” which depicts a man dealing with the rejection of a woman he loves.

“I had to contend with the assumption,” he said, “that this was the repertoire that I cared to engage with.”

But he found ways to connect. When he was struggling with a Brahms song about missing a loved one, he thought about his mother, who died when he was 22.

“I found that if I envisioned a person that I loved and then lost, I could sing the song with integrity,” he said. “This very long phrase in the Brahms was an incredible vehicle for holding all the wailing and crying I still had to do.”

In the early phase of his career, Tines said he felt like a hermit crab looking for bigger shells as he moved from show to show. He developed a specialty in new music, working with composers he had met in school.

When Matthew Aucoin, a Harvard classmate, was working on “Crossing,” an opera about Walt Whitman’s time as a nurse during the Civil War that premiered in 2015, he wrote the role of an escaped slave fighting for the Union for Tines.

Aucoin said he was drawn to Tines’s perceptiveness and his tender falsetto register. “He’s a Renaissance man,” he said, “blessed with not only a voice but also a fabulously keen eye, ear and mind.”

Sellars, who had heard Tines sing at Juilliard, hired him for “Only the Sound Remains,” which premiered in Amsterdam in 2016. Tines landed leading roles in other contemporary operas, playing Ned Peters, a runaway slave, in “Girls of the Golden West,” and Charles in “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” based on a memoir by The New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow.

But it was “The Black Clown,” which came to New York in 2019, that cemented his reputation as a visionary performer. Working with the composer Michael Schachter and the director Zack Winokur, he adapted Hughes’s poem into a teeming work of music, dance and theater, winning raves for his performance.

Tines, who had admired Hughes since fifth grade, said the poem “struck me like a lightning bolt.”

“The fact that someone was able to speak something that was so personally riveting,” he said, “but also so universal, was a revelation.”

When the Black Lives Matter protests spread in 2020, Tines was at first hesitant to use art to speak out. But he felt that the public was not fully comprehending the significance of the death of Breonna Taylor. In “Vigil,” he looks into the camera, his eyes filled with tears.

“Where there is darkness,” he sings, “we’ll bring light.”

Tines’s Black identity has continued to feature prominently in his work. In 2022, he and the violinist Jennifer Koh created “Everything Rises,” a multimedia show about their experiences as people of color in a predominantly white field that incorporated conversations with their relatives.

Adams said that Tines had an ability to “embody that particular kind of nobility and eloquence that you find in the great Black orators.”

“He really has a style to his singing that is unique,” Adams said, “in an operatic world where people sound more and more like each other.”

Tines has won praise for helping redefine the concert experience. In “Recital No. 1: MASS,” which came to Carnegie Hall in 2022, he played with the traditional Latin mass structure. He blended Bach with spirituals and other contemporary works, including pieces by Caroline Shaw, Tyshawn Sorey and Julius Eastman, as soul-searching questions were projected behind him.

Tines is now at work on a project, with his band, Dav­óne & the Truth, about Paul Robeson, the pioneering singer, actor and activist with whom he is often compared. (Robeson, known for his rendition of “Ol’ Man River” and other songs, died in 1976.) He is tracing Robeson’s life and music, including a suicide attempt in a Moscow hotel room in 1961.

Tines, who recently had Robeson’s name tattooed on his left arm, said he was drawn to the vulnerability of that moment in Robeson’s life.

“I could connect to him more in a way to see that he wasn’t just a billboard of its Black exceptionalism,” he said, “but actually just a human.”

In recent days, Tines has been focused on “El Niño,” a work that he has performed several times over the past decade. In the oratorio, which is fully staged at the Met, he sings a variety of roles, including Joseph and Herod; at one point, he is the voice of God.

The soprano Julia Bullock, a classmate from Juilliard who is also singing in “El Niño,” said she was pleased to see her friend find a place in classical music.

“He’s really arriving at something,” she said. “It’s good fun and play and experimentation. It doesn’t feel like he’s worn down or overwhelmed. It’s cool. It’s really cool.”

The other night, after a day of rehearsals at the Met, Tines was at the Blue Building in Manhattan to perform in “Art is Gay,” a night of song and dance hosted by Art Bath, a performance salon. He sang a contemporary version of the hymn “I’ll Fly Away” and an arrangement of a Bach cantata.

Before the show, as the performers were putting on makeup and costumes, Tines approached the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, who asked how he was faring with “El Niño.”

“Are you alive?” Costanzo said, embracing him.

“It was a long day,” Tines said. “I was at the Met from 9 to 5.” Costanzo snapped his fingers, and the two started singing Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5.”

Sitting on a couch at the Blue Building, Tines showed off his pearls, which he has collected while performing in Hong Kong, Germany, St. Louis and elsewhere.

As his Met debut approached, he said he was striving to be a “clear glass” — to make himself “as simple as possible, so that the largess and complexity of what you’re hoping to touch has the space to exist.”

“More so than ever,” he said, “I hope to leave people and myself with an experience that’s quite far beyond people or myself.”