PRIVATE FACES, PUBLIC SPACES / LINDA BLANDFORD : Finding Release in the Sweet Songs of the Lord

It is early evening in the hushed sanctuary of Trinity Baptist Church. Outside, police sirens chase around Jefferson Park, around dark corners and tired, small houses. In the church, the late sun filters through stained glass and the ladies and gentlemen of the chorus ease their legs and aching backs, and find solace in the sweet songs of the Lord.

Slender, distinguished women with white hair--kindergarten teachers, officials in the busy world. Old, old women with shrunken mouths; some who sleep. Small, balding basses in a line of spectacles. Sopranos lapping up the evening’s quiet like round and contented cats.

Into this peaceful gathering bounds Shardrik Boone, chorus master. Everything about him is large: voice, laugh, eyes, warmth, hands. There is a drama to him. As he welcomes back the grand piano, stored away in need of repair for years, its return becomes a veritable triumph, its still-thin and rickety tone takes on another dimension.

Shardrik Boone, director, ministry of music--a magician in the way that some artists are. The pride of a warrior; the heart of a believer.

He is soon mopping himself down. He works constantly: exhorting, flattering, inspiring. A virtuoso performance, and every choir practice is thus. It is why they drive in from Norwalk and from Lancaster, why the bone-weary turn up after long days--to be touched, to be filled thus with the joy of song.

Few here can read music. In a chorus, there is only faith: that one’s own voice, obliterated by the sound of others, will carry true, to be a small part of the whole and to believe that it matters. And thus do these gentle folk walk through life, good souls in a menacing city, peaceful in anger.

The practice goes on until, in an impatient moment, Shardrik Boone lets go as he rarely does: He takes over, and his huge tenor voice soars across the block-long sanctuary, unfolding lines of sacrifice and vanity, themes of bitterness and acceptance.

It is an astonishing voice of burnished gold, a room of its own filled with fire. It was developed in services across the South, as a boy soprano in his father’s church in Lakeland, Fla., at college in Alabama and Iowa, in a summer’s glory at the Mozarteum in Salzburg.

Memories of lessons on the battered upright as a boy, being forced to practice by his mother, in the dark before school, at night after homework. A strong, powerful, loving woman, separated from his father, working long hours as a hairdresser, yet controlling every moment of her spirited sons’ lives--and never doubting for a second that she could do so. “My mother,” he says, “did very little talking and more whipping. But she never had to visit me in jail. She never had to go to an attorney for us. I called her ‘my heart.’ ” Her sons walked straight, along a narrow path that the white man controlled.

His dream was of opera. What he needed, at that point, was a tyrant equal to his mother--a voice teacher who could stare him down, impose discipline on him, note by note. But who would have the energy to wrestle with such a talent and to tame such a man? He is too big, too strong, too full of life. It is unfashionable to take on a man’s soul, to put a foot on a man’s artistic neck.

And yet among all those who tried to help and could not lead him far enough along, one being did capture Shardrik Boone: The Lord called him to Trinity Baptist Church, where, on this dusty, quiet evening, he brings another beauty to the voices of the faithful. As the thrilling sounds of anthems and gospel hymns pour across crowded pews on Sundays and holidays, they surely enrich and comfort as many lives as the grandest opera.

Shardrik Boone, at 33, is still young enough to sing the roles of his dreams: to capture Cavaradossi’s fervor, Rodolfo’s passion, Don Jose’s shattered innocence. But he is already a hero--in this peaceful sanctuary, an oasis in a murderous time.

Shardrik Boone, heldentenor, touching the hem of music, the heart of faith.