When Riverhead High School graduate Taylor Burgess left home to study opera in Amsterdam, it reset her perspective on the world, her home, and her place in it. And this weekend, she will bring some her experience back to our community in an evening filled with heartfelt song.
This Sunday, Feb. 8, coming off of performing in “Porgy and Bess” at the Metropolitan Opera, Ms. Burgess will give a special concert at the Jamesport Meeting House of works inspired by the Harlem Renaissance — a uniquely American arts movement in the 1920s that amplified the voices of Black writers, poets, composers and musicians.
Pictured Above: Soprano Taylor Burgess returns home for a concert at the Jamesport Meeting House this Sunday |. Cindy Clifford photo
Ms. Burgess, 29, began studying jazz and operatic vocal styles with Shoshana Hershkowitz, now conductor of the Stony Brook Chorale, at the age of 14. During high school, she thought she might become a teacher, but Ms. Hershkowitz urged her to not rule out becoming a professional singer.
“She saw that I had a passion for music, and it didn’t take long to learn new songs,” said Ms. Burgess in an interview with The Beacon this week. “Other than teaching music, I never had the idea that I could study performance.”
Ms. Burgess, who graduated from Riverhead in 2014, studied jazz and opera at SUNY Purchase and received a Performer Certificate from the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College. She’s now based in Amsterdam, after studying at the Dutch National Opera Academy.
“I was the only, as well as the first, Black student to graduate from the program,” she said. “In America, they like to pigeonhole Black singers into doing Black repertoire, but my story is my own for the sharing — I love performing standard repertoire or new repertoire.”
“In Europe, I don’t mind telling the Black American story, which is very unique from being Afro-European,” she added. “Our culture is rooted in slavery, and it really does shape how a culture sees the world. Many Afro-Europeans migrated in the 20th or 21st Century, and they have a very different outlook than, say, a Black American who has southern roots. We look similar, but we’re not the same, and that’s a beautiful thing. We learn from one another.”
Ms. Burgess again went through a cultural readjustment coming back to the U.S. in 2024 to join the cast of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” the first opera by a Black composer, Terence Blanchard, ever performed at the Metropolitan Opera, and then in The Met’s production of Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” this year.
“For me, any door that leads to The Met is worth walking into, as long as you still have your pride and dignity,” she said.
“That was very special — I’d been working predominantly in Europe and had never been in a space full of Black singers until that moment,” she said of her experience in “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.” “For a lot of my colleagues there, most of their experience had been because of Black operas. It was interesting to see how choosing to live in Europe had opened up the doors for me to experience anything.”
Ms. Burgess’s program in Jamesport, which is in honor of Black History Month, is titled “Winter Moon: A Tribute to the Harlem Renaissance.” She will be accompanied by pianist and composer Eunha So, whose work bridges classical structure, jazz improvisation, and contemporary expression.
“I wanted to do a solo performance before leaving the States, of works that are very dear to my heart, and very relevant to the times we’re living in,” she said. “I hope people feel inspired, and maybe even enchanted by the music they hear — it’s not the usual repertoire. I’m not really doing anything traditional, and for me that was certainly intentional.”
The program follows the path of two song cycles, she said, which include impressionistic musical works by Harry T. Burleigh and Duke Ellington, and a Debussy piano piece, “Reverie,” which was adopted as a jazz standard, “My Reverie,” in the 1930s, popularized by vocalists including Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald.
She will also be performing selections from a song cycle based on poems by Langston Hughes, written by contemporary Jewish composer Ricky Ian Gordon, and works based on the poems of Laurence Hope, the pen name of British poet Violet Nicolson.
“Her work reminds me a lot of Emily Dickinson — she was a tortured soul who ended up taking her life, but she wrote the most gorgeous poems that truly anyone can relate to,” said Ms. Burgess.
The program also includes a musical work by one of Ms. Burgess’s former professors, Pete Malinverni, interwoven with poems written by James Weldon Johnson, a writer, activist and one of the architects of the Harlem Renaissance.
“Writers are also artists — I’m very lyrically driven,” she said. “If you can find something timeless, you need to bring it back from time to time. The Renaissance is now. We’re always going through a renaissance.”
Feb. 8 will be your only chance to see this program on this trip back to the U.S. Ms. Burgess had to cancel a second date due to auditions in Parish and a debut of a film she’s in, which will be screened within a staged opera, “Theory of Flames,” opening March 6 at the Opera Forward Film Festival in Amsterdam.
“I would like people to witness this new perspective on classical music — it can be dynamic, colorful and relatable,” she said of Sunday’s concert. “It’s important that people can relate to what they’re witnessing. Attending opera can feel very bourgeois, but classical music really did start out as the peoples’ music. My message is it’s still very relevant.”
“Winter Moon: A Tribute to the Harlem Renaissance,” will be performed on Sunday, Feb. 8 at 5 p.m. at the Jamesport Meeting House, 1590 Main Road in Jamesport. Tickets are $20 for adults and $10 for students and youth and children up to age 18.
Tickets are available online here.
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