Laquita Mitchell, who appears as Bess with Gregg Baker
in a previous production of ‘Porgy and Bess,’ will reprise her title role
tonight with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood. Gregg is also in
tonight’s cast. (Courtesy Boston Symphony Orchestra)
LENOX
-- First performed in 1935, "Porgy and Bess" remains in some respects
a musical piece at a crossroads. Composed by white writers about the Southern
black experience, taking the form of an opera, but incorporating elements of
jazz and spiritual music, a boon for African-American theater artists, but
oft-criticized for perpetuating unhelpful stereotypes, "Porgy and
Bess" is nonetheless considered by many to be the great American opera. And
tonight, the Boston Symphony Orchestra plays it for the first time.
Under
the baton of Bramwell Tovey, the BSO will be joined by 14 principal singers as
well as the Tanglewood Festival Chorus for this concert recital. Porgy is sung
by Alfred Walker, with soprano Laquita Williams taking on Bess. Though
selections from the opera have been performed in the past by the BSO in mixed
programs, this is the orchestra's first time tackling the whole work.
"In
terms of tapping into some deeply American theme, it's hard to think of another
piece of quite this power and quite this range of expression," says BSO
artistic associate Anthony Fogg over the phone. "We've been thinking about
this for a number of years, and we finally thought this was the right summer to
do it.
"known for a wealth of memorable songs like
"Summertime," "Oh I Got Plenty O' Nuttin'," "It Ain't
Necessarily So" and "There's a Boat Dat's Leavin' Soon For New
York."
With
music by George Gershwin, libretto by DuBose Heyward and lyrics by Heyward and
Ira Gershwin, "Porgy and Bess" is based on a novel by Heyward and the
stage adaptation he co-wrote with wife Dorothy. It's best Telling the story of the residents of fictional South
Carolina neighborhood Catfish Row, "Porgy and Bess" depicts a
community struggling with violence, drug abuse and poverty.
Though it has been adapted several times through the decades, frequently with an eye toward shaping it into something more like a traditional Broadway musical, George Gershwin declared it a "folk opera," and it has joined the standard operatic repertoire. (By coincidence, the Tanglewood concert falls two days after the press opening for "The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess," a revamped adaptation by Cambridge's American Repertory Theatre that is going to Broadway.)
The Gershwin Estate requires any production of the opera to feature an all-African-American cast of principal singers. (Some wiggle room was left for the chorus members in a concert performance like tonight's.) But it fell out of favor in the 1960s and ‘70s, with critics objecting to the appropriation of African-American dialect and its portrayal of seedy elements in a small black community circa the 1930s. In recent decades it's been embraced more fully as a piece of Americana, and indeed the folk opera that Gershwin intended to create.
"The music is fantastic," says Williams in a telephone interview, drawing out the first syllable of the last word. "The music is still relevant. Yes, some of the things are passé, we understand that, but the music is relevant."
The songs of "Porgy and Bess" have proven remarkably friendly to adaptation outside the operatic idiom, with key album-length interpretations by jazz greats Miles Davis and the duo of Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, and the song "Summertime" proving an irresistible lure to great vocalists from Billie Holliday to Sam Cooke and Janis Joplin. In fact, the opening lyrics to the opera -- "Summertime, and the livin' is easy" -- have permeated the popular culture to the point that many seasonal enthusiasts have doubtless quoted them with no idea of their origin.
The story itself is anything but typical, with a troubled protagonist (Porgy) whose disability compels him to use a goat-drawn cart for transportation, but who wins the affections of the sometime drug addict Bess, living with a different man at the start of the action. The opera's famously bittersweet ending fails to wrap things up in either the happy ending one might expect from a Broadway love story or the type of bloody calamity sometimes seen in grand opera.
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