GREAT RECORDINGS phase 14

GERSHWIN: PORGY AND BESS
Willard White, Cynthia Haymon, Damon Evans,
Cynthia Clarey, Harolyn Blackwell, Bruce Hubbard,
Marietta Simpson & Gregg Baker
Glyndebourne Chorus & London Philharmonic Orchestra
Simon Rattle

4 76836 2
(Angel: 4 76832 2) (3CDs)
Recorded 1988
Stereo/DDD
190 minutes

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‘Simon Rattle’s terrific Glyndebourne company, with every support from the recording team – the production sounds superb – manage to turn Abbey Road into a real theatrical environment. The cast are so much a part of their roles that one almost takes the excellence of their contributions for granted. And behind it all is Rattle, so attuned and so alive to every aspect of this remarkable score.’ (Gramophone)

Awards: Gramophone, UK; Prix de l’Académie Charles Cros, France;
Caecilia Prijs, Belgium; Edison Stchting, Netherlands

George Gershwin read DuBose Heyward’s novel Porgy in 1926 and was haunted by it, but he had to wait until 1933 before the rights became available and the opera he had dreamed of fashioning from the story was commissioned. The following summer, in a rented house on the South Carolina coast ten miles from Charleston, Gershwin and Heyward were able to draw creative inspiration from the real lives of the Gullah Negroes who lived on the nearby James Island. Heyward provided the opera’s libretto and, with George’s brother Ira, the lyrics, while George composed and orchestrated the opera’s remarkable score.

After its premiere in Boston in September 1935, the show (heavily cut) ran on Broadway for 124 performances, but it would be another 40 years before Porgy and Bess was staged (and recorded) in its entirety and recognised as an operatic masterpiece. Simon Rattle had known the work since childhood when in 1976, aged 21, he conducted concert performances in London with a young Jamaican singer, Willard White, as Porgy. He also programmed Porgy and Bess during his early years with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. So, when Glyndebourne announced a new production of the opera for its 1986 season, it was no surprise that Rattle would be the conductor and White the Porgy.

The production, under the stage direction of Trevor Nunn and with a carefully chosen and exclusively black cast, was hugely successful (as can be seen on EMI’s best-selling DVD of the Glyndebourne staging). Subsequently, in February 1988, the entire company reassembled in Abbey Road Studios to make this multi-award winning and definitive audio recording of this great American opera and a work that, nearly 70 years after Gershwin’s untimely death, is now universally acknowledged as the composer’s abiding masterpiece.