 "Photo: Willie Pace/Echo staff photographer")
 "Photo: Willie Pace/Echo staff photographer")
At HBCUs, major operas are not produced every day but the N.C. Central University Department of Music’s Opratorio continues to make waves.
The Opratorio combines African-American oratorio music with traditional opera which includes art, dance, drama and music to create performances with unique harmonious balances. The performance group usually puts on a fall Cantata or “cultured” musical and an opera in the spring.
Usually consisting of 25 or more students that must know how to read music, NCCU asked alumna Elvira Green to design the Opratorio Performance Ensemble course in August 2005. Green has performed on the worldwide musical stage and began her pro career at the New York Metropolitan Opera.
“What it does is to pull together all of the students’ musical studies like sightseeing, ear training, language and diction,” said Green. “All of it plays into the preparation for the operas.”
Green directed the Opratorio’s fifth annual performance ensemble last week while Richard Banks, director of choral activities, directed the orchestra. This spring’s production was based on the novel Porgy written in 1927 by DuBose Heyward and his wife, Dorothy.
The novel was about a crippled black man that commits a crime of passion -- murder.
It was later adapted by brothers George and Ira Gershwin into the play “Porgy and Bess.” The love story is set in the fictitious African-American South Carolina town of Catfish Row and tells the tale of a crippled beggar named Porgy and a woman with a “checkered” past named Bess.
Since then “Porgy and Bess” has been translated into an Oscar winning movie starring Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge, and Sammy Davis Jr. Recordings of the famous "Porgy and Bess" music have also been created.
“Complete operas are not done at HBCUs,” said Banks. “They only see scenes or parts and not the entire opera. We are going beyond that.”
Banks has also performed opera and has sung for several companies including the Chautauqua Opera in New York and the Long Leaf Opera in North Carolina and also often judges vocal soloists and choral ensembles.
Banks said the NCCU production of “Porgy and Bess” was a complete opera and that people that know opera consider it the “highest form of music.”
Banks and Green said that last week’s production was historical and attracted a huge audience. Banks said that of the 450 printed programs, all were dispersed before the B.N. Duke Auditorium was packed and the show began.
“From my point of view, it was a historical event,” said Green, who has been on the operatic and musical stages for more than 40 years. “It was the first time a HBCU has taken on a major opera like this.”
Green said the production of “Porgy and Bess” is a contribution to the University’s centennial and that praise for the performance has been coming in nationally as well as locally.
“We can judge the success by the phone calls, e-mail, and drop-bys we have received nationwide expressing joy,” she said. “People have really expressed the magnitude of this piece.”
Banks and Green said the Opratorio is still considering possibilities next year’s ensembles and will make a final decision at the beginning of next semester.
In the meantime the students and directors say that they want people to know how hard the Opratorio and music department work and for all NCCU students to appreciate it.
“They never consider that NCCU can put on a show like this,” said Green.
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