By Daniel Arimborgo
An audience walked away with invigorated spiritualism and a renewed sense of historic identity, following a performance by Symphony Saintpaulia at the LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, which featured opera singer Ruby Hinds and the Voices Saintpaulia, a gospel choir. The single performance Friday night, in celebration of Black history Month, was a real crowd pleaser.
The show featured vignettes depicting historic figures from black history, and started with Hinds, who played Marian Anderson, the world-renowned opera singer of the 1950s and '60s, who became the first black member of the Metropolitan Opera, in 1955.
Hinds herself has performed at some of the most famous opera houses in the United States and Europe. She made her debut with both the New York City Opera and the Houston Grand Opera. Her sister, Esther, is president and general manager of the Mount Vernon-based Symphony Saintpaulia, and wrote, “See There in the Distance – The Marian Anderson Story.”
Anderson's life was fraught with the prejudice and racial barriers that she had to face throughout her professional career in America.
The first scene is Anderson's dressing room, a half hour from curtain call. Hinds' singing is striking, as Anderson recalls her humble beginnings in Philadelphia, where she sang in church choirs, later joining the National Association of Negro Musicians. A projection screen over the rear of the stage showed slides of real pictures from the memorable moments Anderson depicts.
Pianist Joseph Joubert sits on stage, waiting patiently to play accompaniments interspersed throughout her life's story. One piece was a stirring rendition of “God Bless America.”
Following a brief intermission, the gospel choir Voices Saintpaulia, delivered rousing renditions of Kyrie, Acclamation, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei. Most notable were the superb voices of tenor Glen Henderson and mezzo soprano Elizabeth Maynard.
The last segment featured dual monologues by Sharita Hunt as Sojourner Truth, the former slave, preacher, and pioneering abolitionist, and Ava Coffee Burks as Harriet Tubman, another abolitionist who helped establish the Underground Railroad.
The Voices Saintpaulia gospel choir once again performed, interspersing songs which complemented the characters' storytelling, singing pieces that included “The Good Old Righteous Way”, which was written by Sojourner Truth herself.
Following Truth's description of the slave trade, the choir sang “The Auction” written by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a free black woman who became a popular poet, author and abolitionist lecturer. Later, they sang “The Runaway”, which depicts the flight of a fugitive slave.
Also performed by the choir was “'Tis the Old Ship of Zion”, a spiritual used by Tubman as a code to alert slaves that their secret trip to freedom was soon to begin.
Reach reporter Daniel Arimborgo by e-mail at timesledgr@aol.com or call 229-0300 Ext. 141.
