Gershwin: Porgy and Bess: Nikolaus Harnoncourt | CD review

As he approaches his 80th birthday next month, Nikolaus Harnoncourt shows no sign of reining in his insatiable musical curiosity. Harnoncourt is one of the true pioneers of period-instrument performances in the 1960s and 70s and a musician immersed in the central European performing tradition, so the idea of him conducting such an archetypal American opera as Porgy and Bess with the energy and understanding he shows here seems almost surreal. But as the booklet accompanying this recording makes clear, Harnoncourt has a huge admiration for Gershwin's most ambitious stage work - "music of universal relevance", he calls it - and fully details and justifies the cuts he makes in what is often an unwieldy score. The result here, taken from staged performances in Graz this summer, plays for just under three hours. The cast, with Jonathan Lemalu as Porgy, Isabelle Kabatu as Bess and Michael Forest as Sporting Life, is generally a good one, even if one or two of the voices seem a little prim and more stiffly "operatic" than Gershwin's vocal lines require. But it's Harnoncourt's astonishingly energised conducting, coupled with the tinglingly precise playing of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, that really sets the performance ablaze, while his observations about an aria in Mozart's Magic Flute, quoted in the sleeve notes, encapsulates the unique power of opera so perfectly that it almost justifies buying the set on its own.