New York is never louder than the instant a single unamplified human voice hushes it. At an Upper East Side club, those discreet, patrician rooms built for conversation and conviction—sound did more than travel; it testified.
The Denyce Graves Foundation’s Harvest Moon Gala announcement landed like a silk gavel: art is not ornament, it is guardianship. In a season when public life rewards the echo, this evening insisted on chorus—trained, rigorous, plural, and on the lineage that has always sung the city into its better self.
The Gala will salute tenor Andrea Bocelli—who will perform—alongside Francesca Zambello, Artistic Director of Washington National Opera; philanthropist and singer Chandrika Tandon; and singer, composer, and African Diaspora Project founder Dr. Louise Toppin. These honorees do more than dazzle. They build the scaffolding that lets the next voice climb.
Honorary chairs Barbara Tober and Suzi Cordish, with Gala Chair Ann Gottlieb, framed the night with a welcome that felt like an assignment. Besides the luminous Denyce, Tober praised the “incredible talent” announcing itself one by one, while Cordish marked the milestone: October 6 will be the Foundation’s first New York City gala. The message beneath the pleasantries was plain—legacy is not an accident.
Denyce spoke with the candor of a maestro who has earned every inch of her stage. Performing is a love; teaching has become a life. What began as an unnamed dream is now a working atelier where rigor and generosity are drilled until excellence becomes reflex. Opera is often misread as a sport of opponents. In Denyce’s house, it is a covenant of care.
History stood close. The very voices once kept waiting in the lobby have written America’s memory in aria—Sissieretta Jones filling halls when access was rationed; Marian Anderson turning public steps into sanctified space; Leontyne Price and Jessye Norman proving that grandeur and discipline can inhabit the same breath.
Camilla Williams, Martina Arroyo, Kathleen Battle, George Shirley, Simon Estes—each widened the corridor so the next singer could walk through upright. This is not trivia. This is a civic record.
The evening’s proof arrived in quartet. Inayah Raheem shaped silence into focus—phrases set like keystones, line clean, intention exact; Hannah Jones offered diamond-cut agility with text-first clarity, where breath and meaning were indistinguishable; and Symone Harcum, for me, was nothing short of breathtaking—an instrument of rare voltage, velvet through the center with a luminous crown above and chiaroscuro between; her singing sent chills up my spine that kept returning in waves. Then, in a sparkling gear-shift, Lauren Torey lit the room with “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” bright, precise, and gloriously unpretentious, detonating pure joy and sending smiles through the room like confetti. Representation here was design, not décor; tradition widened without apology.
The night also promised a star-studded Gala to come, with luminaries expected at the Gala—not present at the reception—including Martina Arroyo, Kathleen Battle, Deepak Chopra, Matthew Epstein, Simon Estes, Sherrill Milnes, Neil Shicoff, George Shirley, and Twyla Tharp. Their anticipated presence reads like a living syllabus, proof that mastery and mentorship still travel as a pair.
The Denyce Graves Foundation works where social justice, American history, and the arts meet as equals. Through collaboration with the Smithsonian, the Metropolitan Opera, the Library of Congress, the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, and leading HBCUs and conservatories, DGF makes the archive breathe and the pipeline thrive. The mission is authorship as much as performance—owning repertoire rather than borrowing it, inheriting tradition without being confined by it, treating community as a verb.
There are eras when culture is pressed into slogans, when conformity masquerades as safety, when the public square grows suspicious of beauty precisely because beauty answers to a higher order. Opera remains stubbornly immune to such weather: breath meets body, language meets line, and nuance reclaims jurisdiction. Supporting this work is not a pastime. It is a quiet, disciplined act of civic custodianship.
Under the harvest moon, New York has been given a chance to say what kind of city it intends to be. Denyce Graves has already answered. The future will be audible, exquisitely trained, and unapologetically plural.
The Denyce Graves Foundation Harvest Moon Gala
Date: Monday, Oct. 6
Tickets: https://www.greenvelope.com/card/.public-ad1126e432644bb991885c86516611da37363932313335
