An American in China

Conductor Kazem Abdullah has built his career on introducing American works to international audiences. Tom Stewart meets him in Beijing

- Tom Stewart

Just two decades after the premiere of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, the Soviet Union paid a New York opera company to stage performances there. The year was 1956 and the Cold War was well underway. Truman Capote, who joined the performers on their journey to Leningrad, heard one person leaving the theatre singing the line, ‘There's a boat that’s leavin' soon for New York, come with me, that’s where we belong, sister’. Soviet critics, on the other hand, enjoyed the show but found their worst fears about capitalism and the West confirmed by Gershwin’s tale of poverty and oppression. But the opera soon became a staple of Soviet repertoire, with singers brought in from the US and Europe to meet Gershwin’s stipulation that its performers must be black. Last autumn, almost 70 years later, Porgy and Bess was performed in China for the first time. American conductor Kazem Abdullah, 46, was at the podium, first in Shanghai and then in Beijing, where the opera was the crowning glory of last year’s Beijing Music Festival. Although threats of trade tariffs were still months away, relations between the US and China were already soured. While the festival featured a number of American performers, it was notable but not surprising that, unlike the Soviets, they had not chosen an American opera company for these historic performances. Instead, it fell to the singers of Cape Town Opera, alongside the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, to introduce Chinese audiences to the inhabitants of Catfish Row, Gershwin’s imagined South Carolina slum. ‘It feels crazy, it’s so exciting,’ says Abdullah, speaking the day before the Beijing premiere.

‘I feel like a pioneer, if that isn’t too corny.’ For a conductor who has built his career championing American opera on international stages, these performances of Gershwin’s opera represented both personal achievement and cultural diplomacy in action. ‘It isn’t just