DR Jose, you recently wished me luck with "The Gershwin's Porgy and Bess." Well, I'm finally carving out a few minutes to listen to it. And the result is mixed, which is better than I can say of either "Newsies" or "End of the Rainbow." I might actually be able to finish this one.
That said, the Disney-fied white bread orchestrations are a horror. It sounds like Up with People or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir should be singing to them. And the chorus does sound a little too polished. Everything is a little too mechanical.
Norm Lewis sounds great, though. I'm not entirely sold on Audra, however. Maybe by the end of the recording.
DR JohnG - The recording serves the production better than the actual on-stage production. -And it's very "kind" to Norm Lewis who basically gets dwarfed in the theatre by the more operatic male voices sharing the stage with him. Audra was dealing with the beginning of her sinus infection when they were in the recording studio, so... However, it's her whole package - singing and acting - that won(?) me over in the theatre.
As I believe I expressed after I first saw the show, what really pissed me off was the fact that all of the changes and modifications that the artistic team talked about in the press did not seem fully realized, nor did they make the "opera" more "realistic". -I'm sorry, but an Overture is not "realistic".
I saw "The Gershwin's
Porgy and Bess" mentioned here this morning, and I realized that I hadn't listened to it yet. So, I loaded it on my iPod and listened to it to and from work (still not done). But I can say this...
Not knowing the original well (but enough to comment), it's like I said about
Les Miserables, most of the ensemble voices and especially the solo's, don't fit in the style of the piece and it's jarring to the trained ear to hear these lines sung in a "pop" style. When the ensemble sings, it's fine, but I'm not hearing the timbre of voices that I'm used to hearing on a piece such as this. (and
Les Mis is my point) Not know the original orchestrations like others do, I can't comment on them as I know there is much controversy over them, but I can say they sound small and a bit to "electrified" for a such a piece as this. Audra is great, maybe the only real good sounding person on the recording that fits the piece well, and I guess Norm Lewis is, also, to an extent. But there are some that need to go back to
Hairspray or
Memphis or something.
That was really racist of me, and I'm sorry if I offended anyone.
Overall, I believe that a piece like this should be saved for our Opera companies for it to be performed as it was meant to be.
