26 Aug 2018
Porgy and Bess in Seattle
When this production debuted last summer at Glimmerglass, my Opera Today colleague James Sohre found it a thoroughly successful mounting of George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward's noble but problematic opera.
Recently in Performances
ETO Autumn 2020 Season Announcement: Lyric Solitude
English Touring Opera are delighted to announce a season of lyric monodramas to tour nationally from October to December. The season features music for solo singer and piano by Argento, Britten, Tippett and Shostakovich with a bold and inventive approach to making opera during social distancing.
Love, always: Chanticleer, Live from London … via San Francisco
This tenth of ten Live from London concerts was in fact a recorded live performance from California. It was no less enjoyable for that, and it was also uplifting to learn that this wasn’t in fact the ‘last’ LfL event that we will be able to enjoy, courtesy of VOCES8 and their fellow vocal ensembles (more below …).
Dreams and delusions from Ian Bostridge and Imogen Cooper at Wigmore Hall
Ever since Wigmore Hall announced their superb series of autumn concerts, all streamed live and available free of charge, I’d been looking forward to this song recital by Ian Bostridge and Imogen Cooper.
Treasures of the English Renaissance: Stile Antico, Live from London
Although Stile Antico’s programme article for their Live from London recital introduced their selection from the many treasures of the English Renaissance in the context of the theological debates and upheavals of the Tudor and Elizabethan years, their performance was more evocative of private chamber music than of public liturgy.
A wonderful Wigmore Hall debut by Elizabeth Llewellyn
Evidently, face masks don’t stifle appreciative “Bravo!”s. And, reducing audience numbers doesn’t lower the volume of such acclamations. For, the audience at Wigmore Hall gave soprano Elizabeth Llewellyn and pianist Simon Lepper a greatly deserved warm reception and hearty response following this lunchtime recital of late-Romantic song.
The Sixteen: Music for Reflection, live from Kings Place
For this week’s Live from London vocal recital we moved from the home of VOCES8, St Anne and St Agnes in the City of London, to Kings Place, where The Sixteen - who have been associate artists at the venue for some time - presented a programme of music and words bound together by the theme of ‘reflection’.
Iestyn Davies and Elizabeth Kenny explore Dowland's directness and darkness at Hatfield House
'Such is your divine Disposation that both you excellently understand, and royally entertaine the Exercise of Musicke.’
Paradise Lost: Tête-à-Tête 2020
‘And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven … that old serpent … Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.’
Joyce DiDonato: Met Stars Live in Concert
There was never any doubt that the fifth of the twelve Met Stars Live in Concert broadcasts was going to be a palpably intense and vivid event, as well as a musically stunning and theatrically enervating experience.
‘Where All Roses Go’: Apollo5, Live from London
‘Love’ was the theme for this Live from London performance by Apollo5. Given the complexity and diversity of that human emotion, and Apollo5’s reputation for versatility and diverse repertoire, ranging from Renaissance choral music to jazz, from contemporary classical works to popular song, it was no surprise that their programme spanned 500 years and several musical styles.
The Academy of St Martin in the Fields 're-connect'
The Academy of St Martin in the Fields have titled their autumn series of eight concerts - which are taking place at 5pm and 7.30pm on two Saturdays each month at their home venue in Trafalgar Square, and being filmed for streaming the following Thursday - ‘re:connect’.
Lucy Crowe and Allan Clayton join Sir Simon Rattle and the LSO at St Luke's
The London Symphony Orchestra opened their Autumn 2020 season with a homage to Oliver Knussen, who died at the age of 66 in July 2018. The programme traced a national musical lineage through the twentieth century, from Britten to Knussen, on to Mark-Anthony Turnage, and entwining the LSO and Rattle too.
Choral Dances: VOCES8, Live from London
With the Live from London digital vocal festival entering the second half of the series, the festival’s host, VOCES8, returned to their home at St Annes and St Agnes in the City of London to present a sequence of ‘Choral Dances’ - vocal music inspired by dance, embracing diverse genres from the Renaissance madrigal to swing jazz.
Royal Opera House Gala Concert
Just a few unison string wriggles from the opening of Mozart’s overture to Le nozze di Figaro are enough to make any opera-lover perch on the edge of their seat, in excited anticipation of the drama in music to come, so there could be no other curtain-raiser for this Gala Concert at the Royal Opera House, the latest instalment from ‘their House’ to ‘our houses’.
Fading: The Gesualdo Six at Live from London
"Before the ending of the day, creator of all things, we pray that, with your accustomed mercy, you may watch over us."
Met Stars Live in Concert: Lise Davidsen at the Oscarshall Palace in Oslo
The doors at The Metropolitan Opera will not open to live audiences until 2021 at the earliest, and the likelihood of normal operatic life resuming in cities around the world looks but a distant dream at present. But, while we may not be invited from our homes into the opera house for some time yet, with its free daily screenings of past productions and its pay-per-view Met Stars Live in Concert series, the Met continues to bring opera into our homes.
Precipice: The Grange Festival
Music-making at this year’s Grange Festival Opera may have fallen silent in June and July, but the country house and extensive grounds of The Grange provided an ideal setting for a weekend of twelve specially conceived ‘promenade’ performances encompassing music and dance.
Monteverdi: The Ache of Love - Live from London
There’s a “slide of harmony” and “all the bones leave your body at that moment and you collapse to the floor, it’s so extraordinary.”
Music for a While: Rowan Pierce and Christopher Glynn at Ryedale Online
“Music for a while, shall all your cares beguile.”
A Musical Reunion at Garsington Opera
The hum of bees rising from myriad scented blooms; gentle strains of birdsong; the cheerful chatter of picnickers beside a still lake; decorous thwacks of leather on willow; song and music floating through the warm evening air.
OPERA TODAY ARCHIVES »
Performances
I am delighted that Mr. Sohre's review is only a click away. It frees me to register a strongly differing opinion. I found the staging not only ugly to look at but ill-serving of the work itself.
The setting of Porgy and Bess is a row of tenement dwellings abutting a steamy, stormy channel of the Atlantic Ocean on the southern side of the city of Charleston, South Carolina. To present this shabby but exotic locale this production provides something resembling a Motel 6 composed of rusty corrugated sheet metal, shut off from the natural and human world by a towering sliding door of the same material.
The interior of this container is illuminated for the most part by an undifferentiated wash of rust-colored light, varied from time to time by mustard and vinegar overtones. The color palette could not be better devised to wash out the varied black skin tones of the cast. In a work which is the very definition of "an ensemble opera," the performers face an uphill struggle to make their characters distinct.
The blocking of the action renders their effort even more difficult by keeping the ensemble lined up like an oratorio chorus, letting individuals step forward for individual turns only to fade back into the murk. When the hurricane blows in act two, it batters the tin box, but no physical emotional wind sweeps through the people inside it: they are inert as Neolithic standing stones.
I am certain that the show Mr. Sohre saw in Cooperstown looked a lot different. The Alice Busch Theater is a state-of- the-art jewel box seating fewer than 900 people; Marion McCaw Hall in Seattle is more than three times as large, and its acoustics vary not just row to row, but seat to seat.
There's no way, no matter how sensitively mounted, this production could come across with equal weight in these two halls.
Nonetheless, this is very much recognizable as a Zambello production. She is not so much a "concept" director as a conceptual magpie. Her shows are like theatrical pull-aparts composed of half a dozen contrasting doughs: slice of life, presentational, Broadway-glitzy, expressionistic, according to whatever seems to work at the moment.
In her Aïda here this season (also originating at Glimmerglass), she offered everything from static, stand-and- deliver Stivanello to hokey Broadway hoe-down side by side in the triumphal scene. Much the same kind of megillah pervades the long picnic sequence and final scenes of Porgy.
By the time the show's over (divided into two exhausting hour-plus-long acts instead of the original three), the lingering impression is of intermittent glories (like the mighty Mary Elizabeth Williams' "My Man Done Gone") and lovely flashes (like the cameos of Ibidunni Ojikutu and Ashley Faatoalia as Strawberry Woman and Crabman) embedded in trudging routine.
The principals do their best under these dire conditions.
Lester Lynch sings Crown with grinding menace, but his costume makes him look less a brutal longshoreman than a suburban daddy longing to get his feet up in the Barcalounger. Elizabeth Llewellyn, a debutante Bess,
doesn't seem comfortable with the tessitura of the role (she's known best in England for her Butterfly and Rondine), but she's painfully believable as the helpless creature and blazes up in her (wholly inappropriate) Apache dance with the veteran Sportin' Life of Jermaine Smith.
Kevin Short's Porgy is grandly sung, but he's hampered from the git-go by his striking size and the sorry modern tendency to minimize the character's disability. Heyward's Porgy was crippled from birth and unable to walk at all; Short's Porgy uses (and sometimes forgets to use) a single crutch. He looks and sounds more than a match for his nemesis Crown, leaving the central conflict of the opera utterly implausible. When a Porgy could obviously lay out his opponent with one blow of his crutch, what's left of the story?
A gentle suggestion for my reader: Heyward's original novel is easily accessible on line. To read it is to appreciate for the first time what a marvel of compression the Porgy libretto is: very nearly as fine as the unforgettable songs Gershwin wrote for it.
Roger Downey
Cast and production information:
Kevin Short (Porgy); Elizabeth Llewellen (Bess); Lester Lynch (Crown); Jermaine Smith (Sportin' Life); Mary Elizabeth Williams (Serena); Brandie Sutton (Clara); Edward Graves (Robbins); Martin Bakari (Honeyman). Original production: Francesca Zambello, reproduction by Garnett Bruce. Scenic design: Peter J. Davidson; Lighting: Mark McCullough; Costumes: Paul Tazewell, assistant Loren Shaw; Choreography: Eric Sean Fogel; Chorus master: John Keene. Conductor: John DeMain, members of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra.