Porgy and Bess Suite

arranged for brass ensemble by David Purser

Gershwin’s “folk opera” Porgy and Bess - now generally recognised as his masterpiece - was not a great success when it was first performed in 1935. Although it ran for 124 performances in its initial production at the Alvin Theatre, New York, it represented a significant loss for its financial backers and made no profits until it was restaged, with spoken dialogue replacing the recitatives, in 1941. Since it was much cut on those Broadway occasions, its true operatic status was not recognised until it was given complete by Houston Grand Opera in 1976. Even so, several of its individual numbers - “Summertime” above all - found their way into the popular song repertoire at an early stage and have since then been presented in any number of arrangements, medleys and instrumental and orchestral suites (including one, Catfish Row, by Gershwin himself).

David Purser’s Porgy and Bess Suite begins with the vigorous overture to the opera and wastes no time in making a feature of Clara’s lullaby “Summertime” - one of the great lyric inspirations of the 20th century - which recurs several times in the score as a kind of symbol of the need for togetherness and mutual support among the poor black residents of Catfish Row. But as long as Crown, a rough stevedore, is around there can be no togetherness. It is he who kills Robbins with a cotton hook after losing money in a drunken crap game. “My man’s gone now,” the next number, is Serena’s passionate lament for Robbins at a wake over his body in her room in Catfish Row. In the meantime Crown has made his escape, leaving his woman Bess to be protected by the crippled Porgy, as he confirms in his second-act blues “Bess, you is my woman now.” Although Porgy’s banjo song “I got plenty o’ nuttin” comes from a earlier in the second act, it makes an effective entry at this point, before a reprise of the overture and a jump to the other end of the opera, the closing spiritual for Porgy and chorus “I’m on my way to a Heavenly Lan’.”