The show is part of the company’s opening week but is not its first production. Hollywood fears movie theaters ‘may not survive’ COVID-19 pandemic. In the opening scene, when Clara (the exquisite soprano Golda Schultz) sings the wistful lullaby “Summertime” to her baby boy, the chorus gently eases into the music, beautifully adding a warm harmonic cushion to Clara’s poignant phrases. While there could have been a touch more jazz to some of the syncopated rhythms, Robertson’s conducting and the MET Orchestra’s playing were as superb as the singing. That means bass-baritone Eric Owens and soprano Angel Blue in the leads, with the supporting characters sung by bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green, sopranos Latonia Moore and Golda Schultz, and mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves.
As the title characters, Eric Owens and Angel Blue give one of the finest performances of their careers.

Eric Owens and Angel Blue star in the title roles of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess at the Metropolitan Opera. The production, in which Domingo has no part, has seen ticket sales fairly typical of a season opener — as of midday Friday, not sold out but close. George Gershwin, in an article for The New York Times, called “Porgy” a “folk opera” — a score that drew upon what he thought of as black American music, including blues, prayer songs, street cries and spirituals.

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An earlier version of this article said “Macbeth” was the Met’s season opener.

“Porgy” was created, after all, by white people: the author and lyricist DuBose Heyward and his wife, the playwright Dorothy Heyward; and George and Ira Gershwin. The Met said Monday (June 1) it is pushing back opening night by nearly 3 1/2 months to the latest start in the company’s 137-year history and calling off four of … Like so many other operas, “Porgy” is dated: written by white men and rife with the stereotypes of its time.

I saw one inspiring example this summer: Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which the Met recently announced it would bring to New York.

Review: Hipsters vs. aliens in ‘Save Yourselves!,’ a war of the worrieds. Some consider the work a stylistic muddle.

0 videos remaining. The Met recruited and hired an impressive 60-member chorus of black singers. There is no more moving, or consequential, love duet in all of opera.

Voices were cadenced in way not easily understood and it became clear to me that this phenomenal musical should be left on a theater stage where great lyrics and musical can flow. James Robinson’s production, which opened at English National Opera last year, embraced the period, presenting a stage thick with intertwined bodies in dingy clothes in tableaux reminiscent of American paintings of the 1920s and 1930s (Reginald Marsh came to mind), framed by the skeletal houses of Michael Yeargan’s restlessly rotating set. Like Owens, Blue used her voice to give life to a complex and difficult character.

There was no noticing the mechanism by which any of this worked, one felt the effect. At the Met Opera's opening night, it's often the stars in the audience walking the red carpet that get all the attention, but this time it isn’t necessarily so.

Tenor Frederick Ballentine debuted at the house at Sportin’ Life, and was excellent. Brown (both making their Met debuts). Every singer in the cast was outstanding.

By George Grella. On top of that, there is the unique experience of having popular and jazz recordings of things like “Summertime” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So” filed away in one’s head, then experiencing them in their original form on the stage. Log in for unlimited access. COVID pushes L.A.'s small theaters to unite. Giuseppe Verdi, Jules Massenet, Richard Strauss, Francesco Maria Piave, Henri Meilhac, Philippe Gille and Clemens Krauss, Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Chorus and Ballet. He’s got his gal, the sun, the stars, his life. Gergiev; Kampe, Skorokhodov, Nikitin, Selig, Bicket; Rae, DiDonato, Lindsey, Davies, Rose.

The Met orchestra musicians, under the dynamic David Robertson, had no problem tapping into the less “classical” aspects of the jazz-inflected score, without sounding awkward. Our new Spectrum News app is the most convenient way to get the stories that matter to you. The cast of Porgy and Bess including soprano Angel Blue as Bess bucked tradition and also walked the carpet for an enthusiastic crowd. Photo: Ken Howard.

Everything about her singing was transformational, from her blunt means in her first appearance, with Crown, to the way she softened and lengthened her legato as she took to Porgy—the duet “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” was gorgeous, and her compulsion to return to Crown after the picnic was just as real. "I think it's the music, I think it's the Met, I think it’s really a celebration of American opera this evening and I think that's why people are more interested in us tonight as the opera singers," she told us.

Even conductor David Robinson applauded from the pit. Chaotic presidential debate watched by 73 million viewers, far short of expectations.

The show is part of the company’s opening week but is not its first production.

That “Porgy and Bess” is a portrait of a black community by white artists may limit the work. Out of respect, though, he did not quote any existing music, but rather wrote his own songs and spirituals, folding them into a lengthy, ambitious operatic score.

Its inhabitants are presented here like a community of oppressed but aspiring people, raising families and praying for the Promised Land, though even the working men with families can’t resist the lure of gambling. Eric Owens and Angel Blue, at the heart of all this, were a respectable Porgy and Bess — almost too respectable.

She loves dive bars and very dry martinis with olives, though never simultaneously. The house has the luxury of casting the very best singers, and for Porgy and Bess that means the very best African-American opera performers, who are indeed among the finest on the scene. His “La Bohème” will open L.A. Opera’s season.


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At the start of the evening, the jolt of energy from the stage sparked a sense of poignancy, a reminder of how, for many years, this work was one of the only outlets for black vocal talent. Opera in English was seen as suspect exactly because it was in English, much less George Gershwin’s vernacular music and librettist Dubose Heyward’s Gullah dialect.

It was an explosion of humanity, and one felt grateful to be caught up in it. Owens and Blue delivered affecting performances. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to begin allowing schools to apply for waivers to open campuses to students in grades TK-2. But one felt that the inevitable social and political questions were put aside Monday, and sensed no doubts from the audience, by the quality of the performances.