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7Ceiling fans spin as Nadine Benjamin’s Clara sings Summertime to her baby – it’s the first singing we hear, and Benjamin delivers it gorgeously. You can almost hear the heat – and indeed, it is George Gershwin’s score, buoyantly played here under the specialist guidance of conductor John Wilson, that more than anything establishes the atmosphere of summer in the American south. Gershwin researched it enthusiastically: the prospect of working with Dorothy and DuBose Heyward and turning their play into an opera brought him to their hometown of Charleston, visiting churches and absorbing the music of the Gullah Geechee community first-hand. It’s no coincidence that there’s a slight stylistic shift whenever we hear from Sportin’ Life, the slippery, perma-smiling drug pusher who always has an eye on New York – his big numbers, including It Ain’t Necessarily So, have his voice shadowed by a quietly sleazy muted trumpet.
Nadine Benjamin, una soprano de carrera tardía y por ello mismo reconocida hoy en el Reino Unido como una artista capaz de llegar sin prejuicios de edad, cantó un excelente Summertime al comienzo y durante toda la velada protagonizó una Clara de fulminante autenticidad y carácter hasta el momento de su sacrificio final, cuando abandona a su hijo para buscar a su marido y ahogarse con él en medio de una tormenta. También merece una mención especial un My man is gone que Latonia Moore (Serena), cantó no como una queja individual sino como lo que debe ser, un lamento de trascendencia colectiva, en la línea del Requiem de Brahms.
Ruders’s detailed orchestral colours are never dull, swerving from the sweet tonality of Amazing Grace (quoted in the score) to aggressive dissonance, enhanced by a battery or instruments from harpsichord and piano to xylophone, bells, gongs, woodblocks, unidentifiable grindings and sizzlings and the insistent ambush of a large bass drum. Every aspect of the singing and production is impressive, fluently staged with a backdrop of drapes and a few mobile set pieces such as The Wall. The women of English National Opera’s chorus have many opportunities to shine, and do. The hardworking ENO orchestra excels.
Ruders and his librettist, Paul Bentley, have succeeded magnificently in transferring a book, much of whose action is in memories and internal monologue, to the stage. Flashbacks to Offred’s Life Before with her mother, husband, and daughter are back-projected black-and-white film. Act One ends with a birth — to the Handmaid Ofwarren, a moment of communal rejoicing — Act Two with a death, the whole framed by an academic symposium in which a historian in 2065 — Call My Agent!’s Camille Cottin — plays us Offred’s clandestine tapes, making it clear from the start that Gilead, like Nazi Germany, is a historical aberration.
While watching “Porgy And Bess” from high in the cheap seats, the pop songs fit in and the mix of folk, spirituals and pop are completely unique, and the spirituals have never sounded better. And it is the spirituals that push the production into the third and best one I’ve seen, and, probably the best of all times. Serena, the soprano Latonia Moore’s, “My Man’s Gone Now,” was beyond being heartbreaking, it was also as an indictment of poverty and how one can’t even grieve in peace. Serena’s husband is killed by Crown (Alfred Walker) and unless she can raise $25 to bury him, his body will be given to hospitals to be cut apart and studied. I’ve heard Ella Fitzgerald’s “My Man Is Gone” and I’ve heard Latonia Moore’s keening, distraught recent recording of the same production released December, 2019. But watching Moore’s devastating performance in person is an experience of a lifetime. I live in a small apartment building, six apartments on a floor, and I heard a man sshout in horror a couple of evenings ago, and discovered later his mother had just died, “she has no pulse,” he screamed, and then a lot of commotion and then nothing. In his voice, I could hear the horror of fresh death, it is something that can’t be faked, and it is something Moore manages to add to her voice, not just a wide ranged smooth from sky high wails to low down growls of ineluctable horror, but the sound we make when we discover someone we love has just died. It stopped the show and was the highlight of the evening.
