New York Opera Fest / Ressenyes

In the music video, baritone Overton, wearing a black and red African-inspired robe (Jessica Jahn and Azalea Fairley’s gorgeous wardrobe designs cast rainbows all over town) strode deliberately through the sacred space, singing to the ghosts of these dead souls: William Grant Still’s elegiac “Grief,” a hymn by Virgil Corydon Taylor, and a hope-filled spiritual. The videos included text captions, made almost superfluous by Overton’s impeccable diction. The baritone’s honeyed tone and silken phrasing largely compensated for the sometimes tinny sound of the piano, and his stoic dignity almost belied the pain of the lyrics.

On Site Opera, dedicated to “the immersive and site-specific experience,” closes out a year of some of the more radical pandemic experiments with The Road We Came: Three Musical Walking Tours Exploring African Americans and Black Music History in New York City. The app-based itineraries take in Lower Manhattan (including the African Burial Ground National Monument), Midtown (from Hell’s Kitchen to the Metropolitan Opera and Carnegie Hall), and Harlem (cradle of that creative explosion known as a renaissance). Pop in your earbuds and let the map guide you from landmark to landmark for nutshell commentaries and interludes of song.