Glorious Gershwin | 27 February 2010

The prospect was so inherently unlikely — Nikolaus Harnoncourt fulfilling in the latter days of his career the dream of a lifetime conducting Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess — that I tuned in to Radio Three with low expectations, though with curiosity on high alert.

The prospect was so inherently unlikely — Nikolaus Harnoncourt fulfilling in the latter days of his career the dream of a lifetime conducting Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess — that I tuned in to Radio Three with low expectations, though with curiosity on high alert. Coming to it as a doubter, potentially to mock, I was riveted at once, stayed the course and ended an enthusiast.

The opera itself needed no such gyrations. Ever since Simon Rattle’s pioneering concert performance in the old Camden Festival, then the glorious Glyndebourne production under the same charismatic baton, the stature of this masterpiece, after its long journey to overcome prejudice racial and artistic (often in its own culture envious, even snobbish), has been undoubted in the world at large and in England, too. It sweeps all before it in its huge human generosity as in its astonishing profusion of first-rate musical invention. Apology or condescension are unnecessary: Porgy is up there with Pelléas, Wozzeck, Moses and Aaron, the best of Puccini and Janacek, Lady Macbeth, Peter Grimes, at the forefront of 20th-century operatic achievement.

What reservations still persist are easily overcome in any decent performance — Gershwin’s fullness can lead to excess; ‘too much’, every rift o’erladen with ore, the compassion underlined, the subject patronised, etc. What surprises every time is the opposite; how he, in this first go, incomparably more ambitious in length, complexity, ambition, sophistication than the shows he’d previously excelled at, got most things so wonderfully right.