Opera Project Columbus program shines light on Black composers
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When Opera Project Columbus puts on a show, the first aim is to entertain.
In several recent productions, however, the company has a more profound mission in mind.
For several years, the troupe has committed itself to programming works by Black composers, including pieces that have fallen out of the operatic repertoire.
“It’s like righting a wrong,” said Toni Smith, who teaches at Miami University in Oxford and serves on Opera Project Columbus’ Diversity Committee.
To that end, the company will present “Rediscovered Works: I, Too, Sing America — Part 2” on Sunday in the Lincoln Theatre. The concert is a follow-up to an earlier program that was performed, absent a live audience, for broadcast on WBNS-TV (Channel 10) during the pandemic in February 2021.
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Both programs highlight the neglected contributions of Black artists to opera.
“There’s been this omission that has made an impact on the field of opera, and we want to correct that as much as possible,” Smith said. “A small way to do that is to present music by African American composers whose works have not been produced in a long time or are unknown completely.”
Firmly in that category is the 1932 opera “Tom-Tom: An Epic of Music and the Negro,” composed by pioneering Black composer Shirley Graham Du Bois (1896-1977), a native of Indianapolis who attended Howard University, Morgan State University and Oberlin College. (In middle age, she married sociologist and writer W.E.B. Du Bois, many years her senior.)
Excerpts from “Tom-Tom” will be performed by singers Dione Parker Bennett, Calvin Griffin and Justin T. Swain. Pianist Ed Bak, who will accompany the singers, describes the work as something of a musical and historical journey.
“We’re including pieces from each of the three acts,” Bak said. “The first one takes place in Western Africa. The second act is on a plantation in the United States in the 1860s, so that represents the period of slavery. The third period is the Harlem Renaissance.”
Although it received a rapturous reception upon its debut in Cleveland over 90 years ago, the opera fell out of circulation entirely until after the turn of the millennium, when the score was located in the composer’s archive at Harvard University, Bak said.
Bennett, who previously served as artistic director of Opera Project Columbus, stresses the significance of bringing back “Tom-Tom” to audiences.
“This piece was kind of hidden,” said Bennett, also the director of vocal and choral studies at Ohio Christian University.
During the first half of Sunday’s program, singer Swain and pianist Bak will be featured on a series of songs composed by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912), a native of England.
“He’s a Black composer whose father was from Sierra Leone, and his mother was British,” Bak said.
“People referred to him as the Black Mahler,” added Bak, referring to the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler.
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Pieces by Coleridge-Taylor to be performed include excerpts from “Five Fairy Ballads,” “Six Sorrow Songs” and “Twenty-Four Negro Melodies.”
The “I, Too, Sing America” concert series reflects Opera Project Columbus’ goal to not only diversify its offerings onstage but add diversity to its audiences: Leaders aim for Black concertgoers to eventually make up at least 20% of its total audience.
“Opera has been presented as an elitist sort of art form that puts off people who are just common everyday folk,” Smith said. “Part of what these presentations do is they say, ‘No, it’s for everybody.’”
And, as Bennett sees it, that’s essential to the survival of the art form itself.
“Opera is not going to be sustained if people don’t go,” she said. “If people go to an opera, they want to see themselves represented.”
At a glance
Opera Project Columbus will perform “Rediscovered Works: I, Too, Sing America - Part 2” at 3 p.m. Sunday in the Lincoln Theatre, 769 E. Long St. Tickets start at $27. For more information, operaprojectcolumbus.com.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Opera Project Columbus features Black composers in I Too Sing America
