Tucson Song Fest recital explores being Black in America

Celebrated baritone Justin Austin will perform the world premiere with Gordon accompanying on piano on Thursday, Feb. 9, as part of the 2023 song festival.

The new work uses Francis’s poems honoring R&B legend Marvin Gaye: “Mercy,” focusing on the singer’s tragic death at the hands of his father; and “Sugar,” an homage to the complicated tangle of love and strangers with Marvin Gaye as a central thread. 

The premiere anchors a larger recital that explores what it’s like to be Black in America. It opens with Gordon’s setting of poems by African-American writer Langston Hughes, a seminal voice in the Harlem renaissance of the 1920s who condemned racism and social injustice and celebrated the culture, spiritualism and humor of Black Americans. 

Hughes’ message, coming during Black History Month, is just as relevant today as it was in the mid-1900s, said Austin.

“The plight of African-Americans is the plight of America. It’s all of us, it’s all our problem,” Austin said during a phone interview from home in New Jersey in mid-January. “The antisemitic sentiments on social media, the racist tropes, it’s a negative reflection on all of America. And I think it’s everyone’s responsibility to stop hate, period, no matter who it is towards. And I think it starts with getting out of our comfort zone and venturing out to places that aren’t familiar. And eventually they will be familiar and eventually they won’t be foreign and you won’t be afraid and you will be able to love and respect. The fear of the unknown is very real and the only way to combat that is to learn other cultures.”

Austin said the first half of the recital will feature the Hughes poems. The second half, anchored by the world premiere, will open with a couple arias from Gordon’s critically-acclaimed opera “Intimate Apparel.”

Gordon composed the opera, which premiered at Lincoln Center Theatre in January 2021, based on Lynn Nottage’s 2003 play of the same name. The author, who teaches at Dartmouth University, wrote the libretto for the opera.

Austin earned a Drama Desk Award nomination for his performance of George, a laborer on the Panama Canal who marries Esther, a seamstress who makes clothes for prostitutes and socialites from a Lower Manhattan boarding house. The couple’s courtship was through letters from George that Esther, who was illiterate, had to have read to her by the woman running the boardinghouse.

Austin, who had just started his professional career, was not the Met’s initial choice for the role. But Gordon, who had worked with and mentored Austin when he was part of the Gerdine Young Artist Program at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis in 2016, tapped Austin to workshop the piece. 

The Met’s General Manager Peter Gelb was so impressed with what he saw in Austin in the role that he ended up casting him in the lead and rebuilding the cast around the young singer.

“It ended up changing the entire trajectory of my career,” Austin said.

Metropolitan Opera Assistant Conductor Howard Watkins also will accompany Austin in Thursday’s 7 p.m. recital at Holsclaw Hall, 1017 N. Olive Road, at the University of Arizona Fred Fox School of Music. Admission is free; details at tucsonsongfestival.org.