One of America’s favorite operas returns to the Met for the first time in nearly 30 years. Place: Harris Center Cinema, 1114 10th Ave., Grinnell 1, 2020, in Harris Center Cinema as part of the Metropolitan Opera’s Live in HD Series. 12 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan Girshwin’s opera will be streamed live at 11:55 a.m. Moore, Green and Blue - all Met regulars - come to this revival fresh from “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.” As recently as last year, the idea of two operas with exclusively Black ensembles running at the company in the same month would have been fantastical. Much of the cast remains intact from 2019: Denyce Graves’s caring and comical Maria Ryan Speedo Green’s mighty Jake Alfred Walker’s similarly mighty but menacing Crown Frederick Ballentine’s flamboyant Sportin’ Life and Latonia Moore’s Serena, this production’s finest pairing of artist and aria in the showstopping “My man’s gone now,” and a commanding comfort in the later “Oh, Doctor Jesus.” The soprano Angel Blue’s Bess was one of tragic juxtapositions: luminous in “Oh, the train is at the station” and shattering in the conflicted Act III reprise of “Summertime.” (That standard was first heard, lush and stylishly ornamented, at the start of the opera, sung by Janai Brugger as Clara). “Porgy” is also one of the great operatic portraits of a community as such, its true stars are the chorus singers, matching the instrumentalists with vigor and richly textured delivery.Īs Porgy, the bass-baritone Eric Owens sang with limited power, but imbued each line with dramatic consideration. (For that, we have the melting pot milieu of Kurt Weill’s “Street Scene,” the original sin of American greed in Marc Blitzstein’s “Regina” or stateside verismo in William Grant Still’s “Highway 1, U.S.A.,” to name just a few.)īut in the pit, the conductor David Robertson made an argument for the triumphs of Gershwin’s score, with stylistic shifts fluid and distinctly articulated. If “Porgy” is the Great American Opera, it is more for its score - an innovative and seamless blend of grand opera, Broadway, and invented spirituals and folk melodies - than for its subject matter. (That work, Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” opened the season in September.) It’s no coincidence that the Met accompanied this production’s debut two years ago with face-saving initiatives like talks, an album celebrating Black artists of its past and an exhibition to match, and the announcement that it would present its first opera by a Black composer. But it is here to stay - a discomfort to be experienced, pondered and managed, not removed. There’s no clear resolution to any of the problems that have dogged “Porgy” since its premiere, in 1935.
Black artists have had vastly divergent responses to the piece, but what James Baldwin called “a white man’s vision of Negro life” has remained ensconced in the repertory, held up by the same institutions that have long overlooked the work of Black composers. And its characters, mythic or not, can feel like cartoons of Black pain, violence and poverty. Just a couple: Does “Porgy,” a leading contender for the Great American Opera, fulfill Antonin Dvorak’s prophecy that this country’s homegrown music would be founded on Black melodies? If so, did the work’s all-white creative team achieve that by exploiting stereotypes?īut that argument is on shakier ground with “Porgy” than “Turandot” Gershwin’s work inevitably carries the baggage of American history. And after a long pandemic closure, during which the Met, like the rest of the country, took a fresh look at racial inequities, those questions are increasingly difficult to sit with.
“Porgy” - which returned to the Metropolitan Opera on Sunday after two years, its performances still exhilarating but its staging still blandly naturalistic - keeps raising questions over its three hours. “An exploited race at the mercy of Southern whites, poverty-pinched and segregated in the ghetto of Catfish Row,” Capote said, “could not be more agreeably imagined if the Ministry of Culture had assigned one of their own writers to the job.” “Porgy,” he wrote, was like an allergen to Russian officials - its characters erotic, God-fearing and superstitious.īut its reflection of America was a different story. Its contradictions may have been captured best in Truman Capote’s “The Muses Are Heard,” his 1956 dispatch from a touring company’s historic stop in the Soviet Union.
George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” is both easy and impossible to love.
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