James Karas
Francesca Zambello, the Artistic
and General Director of the Glimmerglass Festival has programmed and assigned
directorial duties to herself of Porgy and Bess, perhaps one of the
most important American operas. She has pulled out all the stops to stage the
signature production of the season and has scored a resounding success.
It is a Negro spiritual, a folk
opera and original musical combination that deals with life in the lower
depths, with race, poverty, murder, drugs and love being ever present. It has
an outstanding score by George Gershwin to a libretto by his brother Ira
Gershwin, and Dubose and Dorothy Heyward. All of them are white.
The opera is set in Catfish Row
in Charleston , South Carolina where the only whites that we see are
contemptuous figures in authority The opera opens in what looks like
a two-story tenement house designed by Peter J. Davison with people looking
from the second floor and others playing craps in
Talise Trevigne as Bess and Musa
Ngqungwana as Porgy: Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass Festival
Porgy is a crippled beggar who
drags himself across the stage supported by a crutch. His physical deformity is
counterbalanced by his essential humanity and decency. South African bass Musa
Ngqungwana sings with a resonance and emotional depth that surpasses the
cruelty and evil that surrounds him. His love for Bess is unconditional and
immeasurable right to the last chord of the opera when he manages to strike a
note of faith, even optimism in a milieu that offers none. When he sings the
moving “I Got Plenty of Nothin” his voice and emotion resonate through the
theatre. A stupendous performance.
Bess (Talise Trevigne) is the
classic victim of her station in life, her sex, her possessive lover Crown, her
drug dealer Sportin’ Life and her physical attractiveness. In her own way, she
is just as crippled as Porgy.
There is no shortage of cruelty
in the slum of Catfish Row. Crown is a lanky, musclebound thug. He runs away
after killing someone and on his return claims Bess who has fallen in love for
Porgy. She resists but he brutalizes her mercilessly. Norman Garrett plays the
frightful Crown and gives a scary portrayal of the self-absorbed brute.
Sportin’ Life is the local drug
dealer and he offers a better life to Bess presumably because he has money. He
gives her drugs but she rejects his offer to go to New York. She is rejected by
everyone as she knocks on their doors except for Porgy, the beggar, the cripple
and another “reject.” Listen to the lyricism and passion of Porgy and Bess’s
duet “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” and you have been repaid for the price of
admission many times over.
Talise Trevigne’s Bess is
attractive, compassionate, tortured and in the end selfish in her betrayal of
Porgy for the drug dealer. In other words, she is human. Trevigne has a
marvelously strong and dramatic voice and she displays a tremendous emotional
range in her performance.
The opera has more than twenty
singing roles and no faint-hearted director need apply for the job. But
Zambello has directed the opera before and her panache shows. There are
outstanding soloists but even more so superb ensemble singing.
The Glimmerglass Festival Orchestra and
Chorus under John DeMain perform superbly.
Opera at its best.
_________________
Porgy
and Bess by
George
Gershwin, Ira Gershwin, Dubose Heyward and Dorothy Heyward will be performed thirteen
times between July 7 and August 21, 2017 at the Alice Busch Opera Theater,
Cooperstown, New York. Tickets and information (607) 547-0700 or www.glimmerglass.org
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