Folk Are Still Folk

National Philharmonic Including the Duke Ellington School of the Arts Concert Choir Presents “Porgy and Bess”   

Sometimes, history needs to repeat itself. Specifically, cultural history.

The National Philharmonic’s 2017-2018 season at The Music Center at Strathmore celebrates Black History Month with George Gershwin’s groundbreaking opera, Porgy and Bess. The simply staged concert opera, Feb. 24, conducted by Philharmonic Chorale Artistic Director Stan Engebretson, features an all-African American cast in the major singing roles, an estate stipulation from Gershwin, so as to forbid white singers from performing in blackface.

The opera tells the poignant story of Porgy, a crippled street beggar in Charleston, S.C., who pines for his romantic interest, Bess. Baritone Kevin Deas, portraying Porgy, and soprano Marlissa Hudson, portraying Bess, lead the ensemble, accompanied by the nearly 180-member National Philharmonic Chorale and members of the Duke Ellington School of the Arts Concert Choir.

The performance is sponsored by Patricia Haywood Moore and Roscoe M. Moore, Jr. The opera is performed in Strathmore’s Concert Hall located at 5301 Tuckerman Lane, North Bethesda. For more information or to purchase tickets, visit www.nationalphilharmonic.org or call 301.581.5100.

Few of the Broadway musicals Gershwin contributed to are as popular and revered to this day as is Porgy and Bess, which premiered on Broadway in 1935 to mixed reviews. It closed after a four month run but went on to become a beloved fixture in American theatre.  The opera is based on American author DuBose Heyward’s novel, Porgy (1925), which gave a groundbreaking perspective in its portrayal of African American characters as emotionally and psychologically complex, paving the way for a Southern Renaissance of writers that included William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe.

For his “American Folk Opera,” Gershwin spent time studying African American music and culture in the rural South. The opera was originally criticized for having a work based on “lowly” pop music. Conversely, black audiences criticized the work for its stereotyped characters. However, the composition became a cornerstone of quintessentially American music, and was even selected by the U.S. State Department in 1952 to represent the country on an international tour.

The compositional history of Porgy and Bess, Gershwin’s most ambitious work, represents the fulfillment of Gershwin’s long-nurtured desire to compose a new kind of opera, one that would blend the classical operatic genre with the elements of jazz, popular music, and folk music that were so much a part of his career as a Broadway composer. From the very beginning, Gershwin took care to draw attention to the special nature of the work.

In an often-quoted article published in 1935 in The New York Times, he described his conception: “Porgy and Bess is a folk tale. Its people naturally would sing folk music. When I first began work in the music I decided against the use of original folk material because I wanted the music to be all of one piece. Therefore, I wrote my own spirituals and folksongs. But they are still folk music, and therefore being in operatic form, Porgy and Bess becomes a folk opera.”