Met Opera revives Porgy and Bess
Famed New York company to hire all-black chorus for Gershwin musical
NEW YORK The Metropolitan Opera will hire an all-black outside chorus next season for its first presentation in nearly three decades of the Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, which opens the season on Sept. 23.
Performances of Porgy and Bess, which premièred in 1935, are licensed by the Gershwin family, which specifies an all-black cast.
“Certainly it’s more complicated, but it’s worth the complications because it’s such a great piece,” said Met general manager Peter Gelb.
Porgy, by George and Ira Gershwin with DuBose and Dorothy Heyward, depicts a beggar in a poor African-American community of Charleston, S.C.
When the Met presented Porgy for the first time in 1985, it also hired an outside chorus — at the time, there were three black members of the Met’s regular chorus of 81. That has increased to six in a group of approximately the same total now, the Met said.
“I think the Met is regarded as an institution that is colour-blind when it comes to casting,” Gelb said. “We have many African-Americans and other black artists who are appearing on our stage in major roles.”
The Hungarian State Opera created controversy last year when it presented an unauthorized production with a largely white cast.
Donald Palumbo, the Met chorus master, said about 400 people had auditioned for the Porgy chorus since November and 68 would be chosen for rehearsals that start Aug. 5.
Eric Owens and Angel Blue head the opening-night cast, which is conducted by David Robertson and includes Denyce Graves, Latonia Moore, Golda Schultz and Ryan Speedo Smith.
Then-Met music director James Levine insisted on an uncut version for the 1985 Nathaniel Merrill production. That staging, which appeared 54 times through 1990, was presented in three acts with three hours of music and two intermissions for a total of four hours.
This production is trimmed to about 2 1/2 hours of music plus a single intermission. The staging by James Robinson debuted at London’s English National Opera last year and was seen this year at the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam.
The last of the 13 performances on Feb. 1 will be broadcast to movie theatres around the world. A revival already is scheduled in an upcoming season. Porgy is among five new-to-the Met stagings next season.
Handel’s Agrippina has its Met debut on Feb. 6, 2020 and stars Joyce DiDonato in a David McVicar production adapted from one he created for Brussels’ Theatre Royal de la Monnaie in 2000. The Met debut of Philip Glass’s Akhenaten on Nov. 8 is in a Phelim McDermott staging seen at the English National Opera and Los Angeles Opera in 2016.
Montrealer Yannick Nézet-Séguin, starting his second season as the Met’s music director, leads Berg ’s Wozzeck opening Dec. 27 in a William Kentridge production first seen at the 2017 Salzburg Festival in Austria.
He also conducts revivals of Massenet’s Werther and Puccini’s Turandot, which will mark the Met’s first regular Sunday performance on Oct. 6.
There will be 16 Sunday matinees next season.
Nézet-Séguin plans to conduct as many as six productions in 2020-21.
Wagner’s Die Fliegende Hollaender (The Flying Dutchman) is an intermission-less Francois Girard staging that opens March 2 with Valery Gergiev conducting Bryn Terfel, a co-production with L’Opera de Quebec and the Dutch National Opera.
Simon Rattle leads a revival of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier starting Dec. 13. Placido Domingo adds another new role a few months before his 79th birthday when he sings Sharpless in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly starting Nov. 6.