I've been listening to this incredible recording for years now, and still find things in it I didn't hear before. For one thing, YouTube has it wrong: it isn't "Gershwin on the radio", but a recording Gershwin made for himself, so he could hear how the opera actually sounded. Prior to this it was notes on a page, or perhaps a piano version, but never the full orchestra with the singers. The tapes of this session were lost for decades, then someone found them while cleaning out Ira Gershwin's closets after he died.
Nobody knew what to make of Porgy and Bess (and here it's called simply "Porgy", the working title), because it was generally believed it would be in poor taste for a white composer to write about black people. Who would be interested in something so primitive (in this case, the unique Gullah culture of South Carolina)? Now it's considered a problem because only a BLACK man is allowed to write about black people. Thus many people still frown on Porgy and Bess and even try to block performances of it.
The fact Gershwin came from a Russian Jewish family who were driven out of their homeland, persecuted and nearly murdered for being who they were, apparently doesn't count. But if George hadn't committed this act of cultural appropriation, Gullah culture might have fallen into total obscurity. I think George knew a thing or two about prejudice, and in fact he deliberately changed his name from Gershovitz to Gershwin. Doors would have been closed to him if he hadn't. He couldn't even play golf at certain clubs because they were "restricted": a sanitized term for "no Jews allowed".
What I love about this recording is being able to hear George talking informally. There are very few recordings of George's voice. In the few radio broadcasts he did, it's obvious he is reading from a script. In fact, even recordings of his piano playing are scant, just bits here and there. He shows up even less often in films. Where WAS this man, anyway? Was he invisible? This was the 1930s, when sound recording and film were at a highly sophisticated level. But he left few formal traces, just those memories of incredible parties where he would sit at the piano and play brilliant improvisations for hours, most of it heard for the first and only time.
Strangely enough, and I've written about this before, many people claim to have "seen" George after his death. His brother Ira was so terrified at seeing him sitting happily on a sofa in his studio that he only confessed it on his deathbed. Now you see him, now you don't - but wait a minute, here he is again! It's as if his energy came from somewhere else, a galaxy far, far away. Most genius is unfathomable, and even George could not explain what spilled out of him like stars in a galaxy, reminiscent of the way Mozart seemed to take dictation directly from God.
What's intriguing about this rare recording, which was never intended for public consumption, is that you can hear George noodling away on the piano during some of the songs, especially "A Woman is a Sometime Thing". The way the songs trail off makes me shiver: literally, he hasn't finished them yet! That's all he wrote.
The other thing I love - oh, there is so much to love - is George talking to the orchestra (he was conducting at the same time), trying to get everyone on the same page, so to speak. But the BEST part is the opening, where, after the announcer tells us what we're about to hear, George stands at the piano (for some reason I see him standing), playing simple chords with two fingers while singing, "Wah-wah, doo-dah, oh-wa-dee-wah. . . " The chords become more complex bar-by-bar, until the orchestra sneaks in - but with each bar, as the intensity builds and builds, the music becomes increasingly dissonant.
This is one reason why Porgy and Bess was considered a flop when it was first performed- no one knew how to listen to it. The music sometimes wasn't pretty - with the exception of the lyrical masterpiece "Summertime", it could be rough and even brutal, reflecting the raw nature of the story: love, murder, betrayal! But the fact that it was a "negro opera" may have been the main factor that closed people's minds and ears.
It's worth noting that George had no trouble at all finding brilliant black singers to star in his opera - in fact, they were lining up around the block for the opportunity. When he researched Gullah culture in advance of writing Porgy, he didn't get his information from books. He went down south and lived with African-Americans for weeks, attended their churches, sang their songs, and excelled at the rhythmic "patting juba" that involved playing your own body like a percussion instrument.
The custom had a long tradition. When African-Americans were dragged away from their homes and forced into slavery, white slave owners did not allow them to play any instrument even resembling a drum, having the deeply racist belief that it was dangerous for slaves to actually try to communicate with each other. So drumming was converted into patting, and the intricate syncopated rhythms were right up George's alley.
They loved him, loved his openness, his exuberance, and his wide-open celebration of their own vibrant culture, which he reproduced as faithfully as he could in his opera. The fact that it never found an appreciative audience until after his death was heartbreaking to him, but as usual he kept his pain to himself.
