The famous opera podiatrists applaud American Lawrence Brownlee for his honeyed, shimmering belcanto tones , which will be heard for the first time in the Concertgebouw next Wednesday. But those notes, he says, only embody one side of his soul. The black tenor puts his fame and also votes for the Black Lives Matter movement. As artistic advisor to the opera in Philadelphia, he was a driving force behind the emergence of two modern-classical pieces that reflect the raw black reality in America: the opera Yardbird , about saxophonist Charlie Parker, and the song series Cycles of My Being , about the murder of a black man in a police cell.”