‘Pastime’ a Triple Play!

Baritone Gregg Baker Joins the Asheville Symphony Orchestra for “Pastime’s” Special Night

by Johnnie Grant

A successful veteran of Broadway and a Lawrence Olivier Award nominee, Gregg Baker discovered his gift for opera while performing the role of “Crown” in Porgy and Bess. The Metropolitan Opera heard his performance in Radio City Music Hall and quickly engaged him. Since then, he has appeared at the Met in the roles of High Priest (Samson et Delila), Amonasro (Aida), Escamillo (Carmen), Silvio (I Pagliacci), Donner (Rheingold), and Belcore (L’Elisir d’Amore).

Baker has also
performed leading roles at premiere opera houses all over the world:
Vienna, London’s Covent Garden, Verona, Glyndebourne, Hamburg,
Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Vancouver, and Baden-Baden. He has appeared with
such companies as the Scottish National Opera, Opera Company of
Philadelphia, Michigan Opera, Cincinnati Opera, Houston Grand Opera,
and the Greater Miami Opera.

Composer
Richard Danielpour wrote “Pastime” with Baker’s voice in mind. The
piece is jointly commissioned by the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Atlanta
Symphony Orchestra, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, and the African American
Cultural Center of Greater Pittsburgh.

Based on
the lives, triumphs, and sufferings of Negro League ballplayers Josh
Gibson, Hank Aaron, and Jackie Robinson, “Pastime” reflects both the
composer’s American roots and his eclectic approach to composition.
With lyrics by Michael S. Harper, “Pastime” often evokes popular styles
of the times in which Gibson, Robinson, and Aaron played, jazz in
particular. The use of jazz is both an evocation of the historical eras
and a reflection of Harper’s poetry, written in a style that Danielpour
describes as “not unlike how jazz composers riff.”

The
title of this work has several meanings for Dr. Danielpour. The most
obvious is baseball’s longtime status as America’s “national pastime,”
and the title also refers to the fact that the individuals celebrated
in this work “are part of history, part of our past.” Finally, when
Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier in 1947, it
was, according to the composer, “damn well past time!”

Consider “Pastime” a tailor-made triple play!