Porgy’s triumphant homecoming

Opera Porgy and Bess Spoleto Festival USA, Charleston ★★★★ ★

Charleston, South Carolina, is a beautiful place fraught with history, long past and all too recent. Once one of the richest cities in the British empire, it is also where the first shots of the American Civil War were fired.

Simmering tensions stretching back to the slave trade have never quite evaporated; witness the mass shooting at the Emanuel African American Episcopal Church almost exactly a year ago. Feelings were thus running high in Charleston when Monday’s performance of Gershwin’s Porgy and

was simulcast from the Gaillard Center into a public park near the church and dedicated to the memory of one of victims of that shooting, Ethel Lance, who had worked for many years at the performance venue.

Porgy is the fitting centrepiece of this year’s 40th Spoleto Festival USA, a rich and adventurous arts jamboree that acquired its name when the composer Gian Carlo Menotti established an offshoot of his Italian festival in 1977. The city may have deep operatic roots – it saw the first opera performance in America in 1725 – but until now its festival had never embraced the opera most closely identified with Charleston. Gershwin’s masterpiece is based on the novel by one of the leaders of the Twenties Charleston Renaissance, DuBose Heyward, and its settings are all local.

Enter Jonathan Green, the renowned Charleston artist who comes from the Gullah community that inspired the opera. His visual design, translated into sets and costumes by Carolyn Mraz and Annie Simon, supplies authenticity, though the Charleston evoked on stage comes with Green’s own twist on the place, making for a colourful celebration of the West African roots of the Gullah. Green is also the creative brain behind the festival’s “Porgy Houses” project, which has seen the opera spill back into the streets of the city.

To hear Summertime here is undeniably moving, especially when sung with such languid beauty as by Courtney Johnson. But the cast is strong all round. Lester Lynch’s dark baritone affords him complete possession of the role of Porgy, and the troubled Bess is radiantly portrayed by Alyson Cambridge. Victor Ryan Robertson is brilliantly slinky as Sporting Life. Under Stefan Asbury’s baton, the young players of the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra find all the sophistication of Gershwin’s score. This is still a momentous and triumphant homecoming for Porgy and Bess.