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Porgy and Bess at London Coliseum
Song of the south: Xolela Sixaba (Porgy), Victor Ryan Robertson (Sportin' Life) and Nonhlanhla Yende (Bess) in Porgy and Bess. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Song of the south: Xolela Sixaba (Porgy), Victor Ryan Robertson (Sportin' Life) and Nonhlanhla Yende (Bess) in Porgy and Bess. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Porgy and Bess; the Prince Consort; Live Music Sculpture – review

This article is more than 11 years old
Coliseum, London; Cheltenham festival; Monument and Tower Bridge, London

Fists raised in the black power salute, the cast of Cape Town Opera's Porgy and Bess turn the closing chorus, I'm on My Way, from one man's song of aspiration into an inspiring anthem of hope and affirmation for an entire people – the masses huddled in the townships of South Africa, desperate for their nation to be freed from the tyranny of apartheid.

This production has been touring the world for four years but this is the first time it has been seen on a major London stage, and there is no denying the power of its message or the vocal power of its messengers. Today, South Africa still has a long way to go to reach the promised land so fervently sought by the anti-apartheid movement, but Cape Town Opera is a fine example of what can be achieved when you finally give talent the chance to flourish.

Director Christine Crouse and designer Michael Mitchell take us back to the 1970s and move Gershwin's Catfish Row to Soweto. It's a perfect transfer, even though we are hearing a black African interpretation of a white man's idea of black American music. It's a bit headspinning at first, but it does makes you listen again to this score and discover fresh approaches to the vocal writing. Slinky, jazzy swing, for instance, is sometimes lost to a more vital, profoundly African sound, particularly in the chorus, whose exuberance and volume is apparently limitless.

Porgy on press night (major roles are triple-cast) was the astonishing Xolela Sixaba, whose voice has the resonance of six double basses. The disabled hero spends the entire evening kneeling on a makeshift trolley, scooting around the stage, which cranks up the pathos and makes him appear even more vulnerable to the cruel jibes of the bad guys, drug pusher Sportin' Life (lithe tenor Victor Ryan Robertson) and the murderous Crown (big-boned baritone Ntobeko Rwanqa).

Nonhlanhla Yende as Bess struggled occasionally against the power of the chorus and the volume of the Orchestra of Welsh National Opera, which conductor Albert Horne let off the leash a little too often for clarity's sake, but she triumphed in her interpretation of this difficult role, torn between her desire to stay with Porgy and the tawdry glamour of Sportin' Life's empty promises.

There are some really interesting voices in this company: Philisa Sibeko, as Clara, sings the signature Summertime with affecting grace; Aubrey Lodewyk, as her husband Jake, has a gloriously easy baritone, and Arline Jaftha, as Serena, is superb as the grieving wife of murdered Robbins.

Cape Town Opera have made this piece their own. Porgy and Bess plays until Saturday: book now – you won't be disappointed. The company's presence in London should make the Royal Opera shift uneasily in its shoes. Its own thrilling revival of Elijah Moshinsky's evergreen staging of Verdi's Otello opened last week with Latvian tenor Aleksandr Antonenko blacked-up in the lead role. I'm not suggesting that Cape Town could yet field a tenor of the quality of Antonenko but, as Sportin' Life would sing, It Ain't Necessarily So.

A health warning should be slapped on the vocal group the Prince Consort. Anyone feeling even vaguely troubled by matters of the heart should avoid their programme of fervent love songs or the vapours will surely ensue. They invest Brahms's Liebeslieder Op 52 and Neue Liebeslieder Op 65 with such febrile passion you fear for their equilibrium – until, that is, they launch into Schumann's Spanische Liebeslieder, when you realise that all hope of decorum is lost.

Thank goodness they included Stephen Hough's Other Love Songs (2009) in their Cheltenham festival programme. No less affecting, these settings acknowledge that devotion isn't always accompanied by constant appeals to moonlight, nightingales, beating hearts and trembling lips. Drawing on many different sources, they remind us in calm and direct fashion that man can also love man and woman woman, and that mankind can love a saviour.

Hough's essentially tonal writing is warm and generous, full of wit and vigour, but angry too, as in The Colour of His Hair, AE Housman's biting satire on the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde, with a tune banal and raucous and a piano accompaniment (for three hands) despairingly violent. Jacques Imbrailo's creamy baritone seized Hough's innate gift for a sinuous vocal line in both Claude McKay's When I Have Passed Away, and most poignantly in Housman's Because I Liked You, after soprano Katherine Broderick and mezzo Jennifer Johnston had dashed breathlessly through Julian of Norwich's ecstatic All Shall Be Well.

Throughout, they had superb support at the piano from Alasdair Hogarth and Philip Fowke, the whole coming to a glorious conclusion in the final Neue Liebeslieder quartet, as fragrant and luxuriant as a rose in full bloom. See, this moon and June stuff is catching.

When Christopher Wren built the Monument, he meant it to be more than a mere stone column marking the great fire of London. He and his associate Robert Hooke wanted it to double as a huge static telescope, with an opening in its crown and lenses and mirrors employed to watch the heavens circling above. I'm pretty certain they never saw it as a giant clarinet, but composer Samuel Bordoli certainly does, and last week he set about making it play. Bordoli specialises in what he calls Live Music Sculpture, created within unique buildings to explore their acoustical qualities and to make us listen and look anew.

Bordoli placed a bass clarinet at the foot of the Monument's 311 spiralling internal steps and a violinist, violist, soprano and horn player in niches set into the walls. The bass clarinet's pedal notes reverberated upwards, joined by the other musicians who, unable to see each other, had to count and listen for their entries. The extraordinary resonance of the building forced the music into a melange of sound, ethereal and beautiful – though marred by the constant chatter of baffled tourists more eager to take photographs than listen.

Later that day, Bordoli assembled 30 musicians on the enclosed west walkway of Tower Bridge . This "sculpture" was more formal than the first, with each musician listening to a click track to co-ordinate their entries. The sound travelled back and forth along the walkway, rather as the water far below lapped around the bridge, and took the form of a single 15-minute experiment in sonority, featuring ecstatic strings and sharp, stabbing blasts from brass and woodwind. More than 500 queued along the bridge to be part of this free event, which featured some unplanned sounds, as when the bridge bossily announced with its klaxon that it was about to lift open for the gaudy pleasure craft Dixie Queen to pass way below, as tiny and insignificant as a toy boat lost on a vast ocean.

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