About The Production
Cape Town Opera has been performing Porgy and Bess for two decades, from the first collaboration with Norrlandsoperan in Sweden to performances with the Shanghai Symphony, and is now considered amongst the world’s leading interpreters of the piece. The 2026 European tour with London’s Chineke! Orchestra sold out in advance in Paris, Lucerne, Berlin, Antwerp and Dortmund. In 2027 it travels to The Grange Festival in Hampshire.
Catfish Row is a Charleston tenement, poor and tightly bound together. A craps game turns violent, Crown kills a man and runs, and Bess is left behind with nowhere to go; the women wanting nothing to do with her. Only Porgy, a disabled begger, opens his door. What follows surprises everyone, including them: Bess stops using drugs, Porgy begins to hope, and for a season they are happy.
Then the community picnics on Kittiwah Island, where Crown is hiding, and he takes her back for two days. She returns feverish and ashamed, and Porgy takes her in again. When Crown comes for her a third time, Porgy kills him. Held for questioning and unable to explain himself, he is gone a week – long enough for Sportin’ Life, the dealer who has circled Bess all along, to convince her that Porgy will never return, and to offer her happy dust and a train to New York. Once he is released, Porgy learns she has left and sets out after her.
The opera ends with him leaving, and nobody knows how far he gets.
Love and Suffering in the Slums
George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess is regarded as the first truly American folk opera. No other work has depicted the lives of African American people of that era so fittingly. Gershwin worked on the project for over two years together with his brother Ira and with DuBose Heyward, the author of the novel Porgy on which it is based. In 1934 he even took up residence on Folly Island, a small island off Charleston, to study the music of the Gullah, a people of West African descent. The result was a four-hour version of the opera, which received a private performance at Carnegie Hall in the autumn of 1935. Gershwin then made numerous cuts himself and shortened the work to around 130 minutes. In this version it enjoyed rapturously received preview performances at the Colonial Theatre in Boston, before the world premiere took place on 10 October 1935 at the Alvin Theatre in New York. Unlike the audience, the New York critics were less enthusiastic. They accused the piece of lacking a clear stylistic line. Because of its many jazz and gospel influences, the work could also be seen as a musical, a Broadway revue or a Singspiel. Gershwin, however, insisted on the label “opera”, not least because of its through-composed form and its recitatives, even though numerous songs quickly found their way into the repertoire of famous jazz singers. Today the work counts among the great classics of music theatre, even if it is relatively rarely seen on Western European stages, which may be due above all to the difficulty of casting the opera’s many roles authentically.
Cape Town Opera, founded in 1999 and the only permanently active opera company on the African continent, is now touring concert halls with an ideally cast ensemble, presenting a semi-staged version of the opera: no set, but with costumes and theatrical acting in front of and behind the orchestra, which is positioned on the stage. The originally three-act version has been redistributed into two acts, without much of the music having been cut. The story told is that of the physically disabled beggar Porgy and the drug-addicted Bess, who is trying to break away from her violent partner Crown and to resist the temptations of the drug dealer Sportin’ Life. At first Porgy can offer her protection and a home. But after an outing she falls back under Crown’s spell. When Porgy finally kills Crown and has to go to the police to identify the body, Sportin’ Life convinces Bess that Porgy will not return and that she could have a better life with him in New York. Bess follows him, not least because of the cocaine. When Porgy returns and learns that Bess has left him, he resolves to follow her to New York.
The evening is accompanied musically by the Chineke! Orchestra, founded in 2015 by Chi-Chi Nwanoku to give ethnically diverse classical musicians a platform and career opportunities. On the podium, Enrique Mazzola immerses himself impressively, together with these ambitious musicians, in Gershwin’s rich sound world and brings out its many stylistic strands in a nuanced way. Before the mind’s eye there arises an image of the city of Charleston around 1870, shaped by blazing heat and unpredictable storms. The violence that reigns in the poor quarters becomes just as palpable as a certain measure of optimism in defying social disadvantage. In the spirituals and folk songs it becomes clear that the poor population there refuses to be beaten down by its bleak living conditions. One example is the classic “Summertime”, which is taken up again and again in the piece. At the start of the opera it is sung by Clara (Brittany Smith, with a radiant soprano), the young wife of the fisherman Jake, as a lullaby for her baby. Already in this scene the whole stage is filled with the chorus and the other ensemble members, who make the most of the little space left to them by the orchestra thanks to Magdaleine Minnaar’s ingenious direction of movement.
With the arrival of Crown and Sportin’ Life, the harmony is over. Conroy Scott portrays the role of Crown with a hard bass-baritone, absolutely brutal and unsympathetic. Through his arrival, the men’s exuberant dice game ends in a quarrel that claims Robbins as its victim. Crown manages to flee, which leads Bess and Porgy to grow close for the first time, as Porgy offers the young woman shelter. As Porgy, Siyabulela Ntlale has a warm, powerful baritone that underscores the character’s constant optimism. The well-known song “Oh, I’ve got plenty of nothing” shows not only his positive outlook but also sends him floating in the seventh heaven of love, since he believes he has put Bess on the right path. Nonhlanhla Yende endows the role of Bess with a mighty mezzo-soprano that has enormous penetrating power even in the high register. One believes her wish to free herself from her former life in every moment of her acting. She shapes the duet with Ntlale, “Bess, you is my woman now”, with absolute intimacy. Nevertheless, the lure of cocaine and Crown’s brutal, virile force prove stronger, so that she cannot resist the temptations.
Lukhanyo Moyake gives the drug dealer Sportin’ Life as a seducer, with a shifty tenor. While the character’s dark intentions are easy to see through in Moyake’s acting, he nevertheless has an almost endearing moment with the song “It ain’t necessarily so”, questioning the somewhat implausible stories of the Bible. Siphamandla Moyake shapes the role of Serena, wife of the slain dock worker Robbins, with a full soprano that constantly warns against evil influences. The Cape Town Opera chorus, rehearsed by Antoinette Huyssen, also impresses in smaller solo parts. Worth mentioning are the two scenes after the interval in which a woman hawks her strawberries and a man offers his crabs for sale. They make use of the entire hall: the woman walks in the spotlight across the choir gallery, which is likewise occupied by audience members, while the man descends the stairs in the auditorium. A certain comedy is sparked at the end of each passage by the cracking of the voice with which both sing of their wares. As a mass, the chorus develops a bombastic sound, especially in the spirituals, that gets under the skin.
Equally magnificent musically is the storm scene, in which Clara sees her husband’s boat sinking, prompting her to run outside. The orchestra renders the violence of the raging hurricane impressively and onomatopoeically. The piece moves dramatically from the storm into the murder of Crown. Unlike Jake and Clara, he is able to save himself and sneaks back to Bess, but is ambushed by Porgy. Now Ntlale shows a completely different side of the ever peace-loving Porgy. For Bess he develops enormous strength and kills Crown. Here Ntlale’s baritone takes on a certain hardness that underlines the brutality of the deed. Yende then very impressively portrays the inner struggle of Bess, who on the one hand is responsible for Clara’s baby and wants to stay with Porgy, but on the other is lured to New York by cocaine. When she lays the baby down on the conductor’s podium to get high on cocaine and then hurries after Sportin’ Life, Yende portrays this in a way that is frightening, yet sadly very believable. The optimism, by contrast, that arises after this dark scene in the final spiritual, which the returned Porgy strikes up and the chorus takes up, makes the hall positively erupt with enthusiasm.
By Thomas Molke
VERDICT
Even without a set, Cape Town Opera stages Gershwin’s masterpiece in the concert hall in an absolutely moving way, creating a complete opera experience.
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