American composers and poets gave voice to their African roots for Newport Classical Saturday night in the Breakers Mansion, and in so doing preserved and carried forward the finest traditions of African storytelling in story and song. Specifically, the tales centered around African royalty – the Queens of African history from various nations and peoples. Nine composers were chosen for this special production called African Queens, with many of the works being co-commissioned by the Ravinia Music Festival, Aspen Music Festival and School, Boston Symphony Orchestra for the Tanglewood Learning Institutes, Denver Friends of Chamber Music, Washington Performing Arts, The 92nd Street Y in New York City, and the Newport Classical Music Festival.
These stories are provocative, profound, and powerful, and the voice that delivered them was equally so. African Queens is the brainchild of opera star soprano Karen Slack, who brings new dimensions to the world of art-song with her nationwide tour of these works commissioned specifically for her, along with the debut of her album Beyond the Years, nominated for a 2025 GRAMMY® for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album. Slack’s stage presence was as powerful as her voice, as she rendered in verse both spoken and sung, and in many languages and dialects, these powerful stories of strength, grace, wisdom and love. Her appearance and costume were regal, her delivery poignant and visceral, her overall affect mesmerizing. Thoroughly grounded in reality, the tales were sometimes violent, painful, and disturbing, yet the overriding tone of the program conveyed the noblest of human ideals, caring, and love, and a commitment to the process of passing these on to the next generations.
The program opened on a darkened stage, with a voice off-stage reading a poem of homage to a “Queen of Ancient Days” followed by dark tremolos and tolling bell tones in the piano, rising to a great crescendo announcing the entrance of Slack, whose first portrayal was of a daughter of the female rulers of the past. The text in Latin is by Jay St. Flono, Slack’s collaborator on the African Queens project and begins “Nigra sum, et Formosa, filia Jerusalem” – “I am black and beautiful, a daughter of Jerusalem” – and then goes on to name some of history’s great African queens. The music is by four-time Emmy nominated Nashville based composer Dave Ragland, whose music opens with a gentle lyric majesty and then evolves in his words “into a powerful, rhythmic dance at its core, reflecting a jubilant celebration of heritage and strength” and ending with a reverent and peaceful invitation to enter into the temple of the Divine Mothers of Water.
The next set of texts was also by St. Flono, a classical singer, actor, librettist, and author from Brooklyn, New York, whose work “centers around the power of myth and its intersection with themes of music, language, beauty, death, identity, family, and home.” They describe Aminata, a fierce Hausa warrior (Nigeria) with music by Carlos Simon (Composer in Residence, Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts), the legendary Queen of Sheba (Ethiopia) who journeyed to meet the biblical King Solomon with music again by Dave Ragland, and the Kongolese Queen Nzingha (Angola) who was forced to accept Christianity as a condition of freeing her people from the Portuguese occupation. The music by Jesse Montgomery, Musical America 2023 Composer of the Year and whose middle name is Nzingha, aptly paints Nzingha’s struggle with accepting values that went against the sacred beliefs of her peoples. The text is freely delivered over a piano part that employs a dark three-note motive over a tolling single note in a repeating ostinato that resembles a sad litany, occasionally breaking into a tumultuous whirlwind of dark sound.
Born in Ghana to Nigerian parents, multiple awards winning now United States based film and television composer Fred Onovwerosuoke has travelled the entire world and has researched music traditions in over 30 African countries, describing in his words “a hidden gold mine yet largely untapped” that give his music an “unmistakable and genuine” African sensibility. His Luwah (Bitter Tears), a dirge from Cameroon, set in Mokpe-Bakweri and English from a traditional folktale collected by Lyombe Eko, captured the heart with its tender, sad, and deeply expressive rendering. As the languages melded together into a singularity, no translation was necessary, as the music spoke its own meaning.
Introduced by three tolling single notes in the piano, which then went on to weave the most sensitive accompaniment to the heartfelt rendering, sensing a D minor but never resolving. At its conclusion, pianist Kevin Miller soliloquized an ethereal postlude in B-flat major that directly segued into the final work on the first half, A Letter from Queen Ufua (Esan, the central region of Edo, Nigeria) crafted by poet Tsitsi Ella Jaji from a letter from the queen to the daughters of composer Shawn E. Okpebholo (“fresh…new…fearless…devastatingly beautiful” – The Washington Post) who are her great-great-great-grandchildren, each given an identity beside their name as beauty (Corinne) and life (Eva), beside light (Ufua herself). Okpebholo received a commission from Newport Classical in 2022. Read my review of that work here.
Onovwerosuoke’s Duniya (Mystic Universe) opened the second half on a poem co-edited with Sankung Susso, and in the composer’s words:
Duniya taps from griot vocal traditions from the Mali/SeneGambia sub-region of West Africa and draws accompaniment ideas from the four-string kontigo and the robust low drones of the also multi-stringed kamelangoni. The song draws from ancient Mandinka poetry about the unsurpassed wisdom of an Almighty, Supreme God, who must be the true and only architect of the universe.
Baltimore native now Dallas based Emmy award winning composer Jasmine Arielle Barnes, whose music was described by the Boston Globe as “the best possible blend of Billie Holliday and Claude Debussy” wrote compelling music to Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton’s text of an imaginary conversation of the Zulu nation’s real Queen Nandi, reaching out from the grave to her son Shaka, ruler of the Zulu tribe (1816-1828). Shaka worshipped his mother and ruled with a cruel fierceness. Mouton’s imaginative conversation sought to turn her son with the words of the title line I am not your God and went on to say “She is of God. She is the eyes that Loved God and shined as the Love returned to the source of her humanity where the heart truly lives.” The music, declamatory at first, settled gently into a segue that led to Will Liverman’s A Prayer, a gently soaring setting of the text by St. Flono that opened the concert.
The final two works were a delightful Maroon (Jamaica) Patois (Creole) text by Mary Ground set to music by Atlanta based composer Joel Thompson. Queen Nanny’s Lullabye depicts Nanny of the Maroons, who led the resistance against the British colonizers in the First Maroon War 1728-1740. While the music has the lilt and rhythm of a Jamaican lullaby, there is a dark side, as Nanny was a caster of spells to kill her captors, even as she herself gently slipped into her own sleep of death. The final work was the powerful Amanirenas, by acclaimed composer Damien Geter, set to a tex by Lorene Cary. Amanirenas was the Warrior-Queen who lost one of her eyes repelling the Roman invasions of Kush in the lower Nile Valley and upper Nubia (Sudan) in the mid to late first century BCE. Geter “infuses classical music with styles from the Black diaspora to create music that furthers the cause for social justice” (~ from the Program Notes). The final notes of this work contrast the fierce warrior with the gentle mother, as Amanirenas implores her daughter “Do not take up my sword. Do not strap on my shield. Patience…I will give you a crown.”
As captivating as Slack’s performances were, so too pianist Kevin Miller proved himself a collaborator of equal worth with his expressive and sensitive playing, keenly in synch with Slack’s powerful yet expressive voice, and her masterful portrayals of her characters and delivery of the music and the stories it told. The audience was treated to a rousing, jazzy spiritual encore (I Can Tell the World) that ended the night with “…and he brought joy to my soul.”
The festival continues Sunday with the acclaimed Australian guitar Ziggy and Miles, followed by the Gavlvin Cello Quartet, who will offer the World Premiere of a Newport Classical Commission honoring the Wampanoag and reimagining the story of runaway slave boy, Juno-nominated indigenous cellist and composer Cris Derksen’s First Light. View the full season here.