Porgy and Bess: A Symphonic Picture (arr. Robert Russell Bennett)

Program notes

About the Work

George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess opened in Boston in September 1935 and moved to Broadway, where it ran for sixteen weeks. Gershwin made a concert suite from it himself the following year, which he called Catfish Row, and died in 1937.

The Symphonic Picture came five years later. Fritz Reiner, then conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony, wanted a concert piece drawn from the score and went to Robert Russell Bennett, the leading Broadway orchestrator of the day and a friend and colleague of Gershwin. Reiner was unusually specific. He chose the excerpts and their order, which is not the order of the opera, and asked for saxophones and a banjo but no piano. The length, twenty-four minutes, was reportedly planned to fit on three 78 rpm records. Bennett said that he followed Reiner’s plan faithfully while staying loyal to what he knew of Gershwin’s harmonic and orchestral intentions, and much of the scoring is close to the composer’s own. Reiner conducted the first performance in Pittsburgh in 1943.

Where Catfish Row keeps to the more symphonic parts of the opera, Bennett’s piece goes for the songs. As the close of a programme that begins with Ives’s hymn, it also stands for the other American tradition this concert sets beside the experimentalists: music written for the theatre and meant to be loved at first hearing.

What to Listen For

Bennett’s sequence runs without a break. It opens on Catfish Row at daybreak, with the street cries of the Strawberry Woman and the Crab Man, almost the only passages in the opera that Gershwin took from what he had heard in Charleston. Clara’s music and the bustling introduction to Act One follow, and only then, several minutes in, comes ‘Summertime’.

After it the banjo strums in for ‘I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’‘. The hurricane music supplies the one stretch of real violence, with the full brass and percussion. Out of it rises ‘Bess, You Is My Woman Now’, the love duet. The picnic music ‘Oh, I Can’t Sit Down’ restores the high spirits; Sportin’ Life’s two numbers, ‘There’s a Boat Dat’s Leavin’ Soon for New York’ and ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’, follow; and the piece ends as the opera does, with the spiritual-like ‘Oh Lawd, I’m on My Way’.