Jubilant sykes full biography of king

Jubilant Sykes has sung classical and spiritual music at the Metropolitan Opera, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, London’s Barbican Centre and the Hollywood Bowl.

But Hartford Stage is a decidedly different venue for a veteran of the world’s concert stages.

This time he’ll be in character, playing lyric tenor Roland Hayes, the first world-renowned African American classical vocalist, in the premiere of Daniel Beaty’s “Breath & Imagination,” which begins preview performances Thursday at Hartford Stage. The show opens Jan. 16 and plays through Feb. 9.

“Breath & Imagination,” a co-production with Pittsburgh’s City Theatre, is a play with music – spirituals, classical pieces and original songs by Beaty – which chronicles Hayes’ life, career and his relationship with his mother, Angel Mo’, played by Kecia Lewis-Evans (Broadway’s “Leap of Faith,” “Chicago” and “Once on This Island”). Tom Frey (“2 Pianos/4 Hands”) is cast as The Accompanist/Officer/Pa/Preacher/Mr. Calhoun/Miss Robinson/ Frenchman/King George V.

The Hartford gig is not Sykes’ first acting job. He made his theatrical debut in 2001 in “Bloomer Girl,” City Center’s Encores! production of the work by E.Y. Harburg and Harold Arlen. He experienced character acting when he performed the role of the Celebrant in the Grammy Award-nominated 2009 recording of Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass.”

After performing “Mass” at the Hollywood Bowl, he received a letter from Oscar-winner Helen Hunt who said he created a riveting character and should think about acting as well as singing.

“I was always interested in exploring acting,” says Sykes, during a break in rehearsals in downtown Hartford. “From my earliest days as a singer, I always had a lot of actor friends and there was a part of me t

It has taken the best part of thirty-four years for Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass” to receive this, its first fully professional presentation in the UK.

Whilst the composer’s subtitle for “Mass” – ‘A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players and Dancers’ – is key to understanding the nature of the work, this was not a fully staged production. The Barbican space would not have accommodated this in addition to the vast array of singers and players, but the director had organised appropriate entrances, movement and gestures within the imposed constraints, and the singers were aptly costumed.

“Mass” was conceived and created for the opening of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and was the first music heard in that building’s Opera House on 8 September 1971 (intriguingly, the score is dated the 9th).

It caused a stir – to put it mildly – then, and it continues to proveitself to be a troubled and troubling work, with its questioning of the traditional words of the Mass, the crowd’s increasingly hostile demands for peace, the smashing of the symbols of the Mass – chalice and monstrance – the defiling of the altar and the Celebrant’s ‘breakdown’ of control over himself and the proceedings.

Much of the above ‘action’ could only be hinted at in this performance, though the intent was clear through the power of Bernstein’s score and the commitment of the performers.

A work which is now commonly held to have been influential onBernstein’s “Mass” is Britten’s “War Requiem”, with its ‘layering’ of the forces and the interspersing of non-sacred texts into a liturgical context.

But Bernstein goes further than Britten does by assigning different’styles’ to different sections of the work.

The liturgical portions are invariably given over to a ‘formal’ adultmixed-voice choir, usually singing in Latin, accompanied by a ‘pitorchestra’ of strings, percussion and org

Wednesday Journal of Oak Park and River Forest
By Cathryn Wilkinson
Published January 16, 2007
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Music Review

Hearing the Chicago Sinfonietta’s Tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Jan. 14, in Dominican University’s Lund Auditorium was a little like settling in for a long reception line of unrelated visitors-each stopping by with a friendly and imaginative word, and all dressed with high professionalism. True to their mission, “Musical excellence through diversity,” the Sinfonietta’s polished line-up was part concert and part pep rally, fire, brimstone, history, and call to arms-that is, arms of a distinctly nonviolent variety.

With over four decades of hindsight, Americans have made much of King’s immortal “I Have a Dream” manifesto. Paul Freeman, founder and music director of the Sinfonietta, interprets King’s credo as a challenge to embrace America’s richly diverse peoples and culture. And so, through an array of moods and styles, he offered a musically diverse program, from the intensely poignant “Lyric for Strings” by African-American George Walker to the syncopated fervor of Richard Smallwood’s “Anthem of Praise” on the text of Psalm 150.

The oldest and perhaps most traditional work on the program was performed by the youngest: the tall and distinguished Jeremy Ajani Jordan, a 17-year-old prodigy from Chicago. Jordan’s concentration and solid leadership as soloist in Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 1 are hallmarks of a rare natural talent. He engaged in an easy dialogue with the orchestra, almost like a chemist carefully mixing a magic potion, not hampered in the least by the demanding cascades of rippling scales-in D-flat no less! This young pianist’s superbly assured performance gives hope for a future generation that will be stirred by the challenges and rewards i