"Porgy and Bess is much more of an opera than one might think. It’s like this: the composer died less than two years after the first performance, and the piece has so much potential for superficial success, so many aspects that makes a superficial success inevitable in fact, that if you focus your attention on these aspects, it’s obvious that 10, 20 or 30 years later the question will arise: What genre does it actually belong to? Is Porgy and Bess a musical or an opera?"
I am quite certain that Gershwin wanted to write an opera, and that this is what he did. The composer made quite a few comments that back up this view. Unlike his previous stage works, which are genuine musicals, Porgy and Bess is an opera. However, it is possible to bend it into the shape of a musical. It can be done. And the individual numbers that are actually very serious and very vivid can easily be turned into ‘smash hits'. That  has happened often enough.
Just take the Porgy recording made in Berlin in 1952 under the baton of the same conductor who directed the premiere. Only 15 years after Gershwin's death, the conductor had already cut every passage that was at all operatic in character! He didn’t stick to a single one of Gershwin’s tempo markings! Gershwin indicated the tempo for every number - there may be the odd mistake among his markings, it’s true. But in the 1952 recording, no notice whatsoever was taken of the composer’s original intentions. A huge fuss was made about the production, and there were some big names involved. But the work as performed no longer bore any resemblance at all to what Gershwin had written. And I fear that people in Europe formed their opinion of Porgy based on this production. The handful of highlights is still there somehow. But the rest is simply a musical with a few hits. That’s handful down with audiences."

Porgy and Wozzeck
“What did Alban Berg and Gershwin have in common? Actually a lot more than one might think, in musical terms too. Why else would Gershwin travel to Europe before he embarked on his first opera score? At that time, he had already written a whole number of musicals. He was a composer to whom ideas came easily - one of the truly great talents in 20th-century music.
He started by working together with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. After all, if Gershwin wanted to drink at the fountain of wisdom and absorb a couple of centuries of European musical tradition, he had to go to the source. Which in those days meant the city on the Seine and Madame Boulanger. I don’t know if he benefited from this, or if he found what he learnt to be irrelevant. But his visit to Alban Berg most definitely had consequences. Berg presented him with a copy of the score of his own opera Wozzeck. The parallels between the two works go far beyond the milieu they are set in. The two composers even use certain sequences of notes for particular situations, and there are various musical forms that occur in parallel in both operas. Lullabies, fugues...I'm not aware that Gershwin had ever written a fugue before. He and Berg seem to have been genuine kindred spirits."

"Summertime" - Does a hit have to be superficial?
"On one of the very early recordings, I heard a paraphrase by Jascha Heifetz of Sporting Life’s last song. A marvellous rendering, theres nothing superficial about it at all. A line like 'There’s a boat that’s leaving soon to New York’ is truly enthralling, what’s superficial about that? Mozart once wrote to his father that he wanted the idiots in the audience - the people who have next to no idea about music - to be moved too. Just think of an onion and of Die Zauberflöte, that’s a good analogy. When you hear 'ln diesen heil'gen Hallen kennt man die Rache nicht', your first reaction is 'Wonderful, marvellous! An aria full of humanity, and Sarastro is the embodiment of wisdom.' Then you peel away the first layer of the onion and you notice the piece is a semitone too low: it’s set in E major and it should be in F major. Something's wrong here, maybe Sarastro isn't quite as magnanimous as we thought. Then you peel away another layer and see that Mozart has set the word Mensch to a B sharp, a note that to all intents and purposes didn’t exist at the time; he repeats the note on the word Verräter (traitor), in the second verse, and by the end we start to realise that Sarastro is actually a liar and the scoundrel of the piece: not a word he says is true. The superficial listener enjoys the opera greatly, he feels Mozart has given him a nice warm shower. And the work also holds treasure in store for the music-lover who wants to know what the composer really composed. Precisely this is something we find time and time again in the works of the really great composers. You’ve heard a piece you really like. 'Wonderful', you think, 'I like that, and I can even whistle the tune.' Then later you notice that the music actually has an important message that expresses something quite different. And you don’t see this from the text, but from the music itself: it’s the music that supplies the subtext."

What does Porgy stand for?
"For me, Porgy and Bess stands for America. For the America of the 1920s and ’30s, when the country had long since established its own identity. It was time for the American opera to be written, and I don’t believe there was any other composer apart from Gershwin who had the right passport for the purpose. In my opinion, Porgy and Bess is the American opera: this is 'world music', music of universal relevance. I've only actually seen it on the stage a single time, but whenever I heard any of the songs, I found myself deeply moved. But it didn’t put me in a cheerful mood. And whenever I give a radio or TV interview and I'm asked what piece I would like to hear played, I always choose something from Porgy and Bess - for example, the last duet with Crown and Bess on Kittiwah, which is certainly not a light-hearted piece."

The version played here
"At the outset I thought I would play the work in its entirety, just as Gershwin composed it. The first conductor to do this was Lorin Maazel with the Cleveland Orchestra. They said to themselves: that’s how the opera is, and that's the way Gershwin wanted it - with good reason, in the context of what they knew at the time. I originally thought I would do it the same way, but then I read a number of articles about the work and its first scenic performance, including the discussions between the librettist, the composer and the producer. And these three men were constantly working to create an even better and more logical version. There was substantially more music in the score than even Gershwin himself wanted: he wasn't determined to keep everything he'd written, he wanted things to be more logical at the decisive points. This working process didn't only lead to cuts - new things were added as well, such as the 'Symphony of Noise'. I made copious notes on all these changes and spent a lot of time thinking about how I wanted my reading of the score to be. And I find the risult thoroughly convincing. I mean, it’s certainly interesting from an academic point of view to know what the whole thing is like. But the opera as the librettist, the composer and the producer worked it out in 1935 makes the most convincing impression on me.

Gershwin's swing
"I definitely didn't use to be a particular expert on Porgy and Bess. I was familiar with a few numbers from a piano score that someone sent my father - that must have been in 1935: he played a few of the hits on the piano and sang to his own accompaniment. That was quite normal in our family. If a piece of music appealed to my father, he would sit down at the piano and play it, sometimes singing along as well. He could even play it from memory, without sheet music, if he had an idea of how it went. A bit like the Austrian cabaret artist Hermann Leopoldi and the like. Later on we sang pieces by the Comedian Harmonists at home - probably with at least as much swing as the Harmonists themselves! That was a very German type of swing. But one shouldn't forget that there were German big bands too, even during the Nazi era. Officially they weren’t allowed, of course, so their activities were kept secret - but they were available when needed. I think I have a little of that in me - I've often been told by people in the know that I bring the swing back into classical music. So I most certainly won't produce a superficial rendering. But for me it’s like this: if you split one note into 16 equal semiquavers, as it's taught at university, the outcome is unrealistic and truly horrible! Nothing like this exists in nature - there, things are uneven and irregular, but in a totally clever and human and natural way. Like a heartbeat, which has a certain regularity, but also has its own swing."