Porgy and Bess
Royal Festival Hall
Artaxerxes
Linbury Studio
Cape Town Opera has been on tour in the last ten days, taking its production of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess to Cardiff, the Southbank Centre and Edinburgh. I went to the first of the two London performances, staged but without scenery. The action took place behind some of the orchestral players, with the rest either side. That is not an ideal situation, but nevertheless Gershwin’s finest score came across with enormous impact — in fact, I was freshly astonished at how much finer this work is than anything else he wrote. Whereas, I gather, the production is set in Soweto, at the Festival Hall it wasn’t set anywhere at all. It is therefore about black people, but not about any particular set of them, so that part of James Baldwin’s critique of the opera — specifically the movie — is sidelined.
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