On his return to Washington, Anthony D. Anderson faced the Lincoln Memorial, scanning the sprawling crowd and the orchestra behind him.
He has no relation to the contralto who famously sang in front of the Lincoln Memorial 85 years ago after she was banned from a concert hall because of her race. But they share talent and grit and a barrier-breaking place in our nation’s fraught history. And who better to showcase this idea than Anderson, who found opera while he was a student at Duke Ellington School of the Arts in D.C.about Anderson after someone told me a college student who had to drop out because he couldn’t afford tuition was putting on a free concert in a D.C. church on a June night seven years ago. I should check him out, he’s pretty good, the guy said.
When Anderson and tenor Antonio Poli sang a piece from Madama Butterfly, a child waiting for a blood draw stopped, listened and ran toward the music.“Oh. I like that,” said Madison White, who is 7 and happened to be at the hospital to have her eyes examined. We started talking about the music. She likes Hamilton, and it reminded her a little of it. Turns out she was there with her dad, D.C. Councilmember Robert C. White Jr. . Madison said the music calmed her.
“He got me here. And he got me on a plane for the first time,” she said, reminding me of the trip she took to see him sing at a gala in Fort Worth. “I’m so proud. So proud.”“One person actually came up to me and was, like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve never heard this, this style of music before,’” Anderson said.