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. Miscalculations of length, pace, tone are as nought weighed against felicities more usually the result of long experience. He somehow manages to combine them with the force and freshness of a young bull in his first field of frisky heifers (plus a few moments in the china shop).
So how was this full-blooded, pulsatingly physical, all-human-life-charged piece under Harnoncourt? Celebrated early on for his deadening touch with the Baroque — I recall set after set of mechanised and eviscerated Bach Cantatas — this remarkable musician has widened his scope, and with the expanded repertoire broadened into flexibility and ardour. Sometimes these adventures have been disconcerting, sometimes plain perverse. But, on the whole, positive. I recall a Missa Solemnis from the Proms, the first in my experience to ‘solve’ Beethoven’s problematic testament, wherein the conductor’s previous limitations bore fruit in the clarity that disentangled the heroically striving textures while not betraying the intensity and inwardness that the work equally needs. On the lighter side, Harnoncourt’s way with Johann Strauss operetta has turned out to be unexpectedly winsome and idiomatic.
Porgy stands somewhere between: at once densely charged-up (sometimes supercharged) yet retaining close contact with the Tin Pan Alley in which Gershwin’s genius is rooted — serious and searching interpenetrated with raucous, vulgar, entertaining, sexy. Harnoncourt caught the potent mix with uninhibited abandon and scrupulous care, helped by a responsive orchestra and a magnificent cast. Cuts were made in the long evening — I regretted especially the loss of most of the opening sequence wherein the life of Catfish Row slowly stirs into being via the bluesy piano and the men’s lazy vocalising till ‘Summertime’ floats in as consummating bloom — but integrity was maintained: the sense of an evolving organism throughout the episodic action conveyed with unobtruding sureness. I’ve never been so convinced, or moved, by the closing stretch, Porgy’s return from jail, gradual realisation that Bess is gone, determination to follow her, cripple in a goat-cart, to New York. The closing Spiritual ‘I’m on my way’, rather than the usual lapse into showbiz uplift, was an overwhelming fusion of hope, pathos, delusion.
The sole unidiomatic factor was the all-important chorus. Somehow the ‘Arnold Schönberg Choir of Vienna’ doesn’t ring true for the underdog populace of Charleston or the fervent congregations of its off-shore Gullahs! But they certainly sang superbly their intricate music, as demanding in its way as the work of their titular patron. And let’s not forget that Schönberg was a passionate advocate of Gershwin’s genius, in the teeth of cultural discrimination and wimpish good taste; that the two composers became good friends and tennis partners under the balmy California sun, and painted each other’s portraits — a piquant vraisemblance shedding light on the aims and achievements of both.
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