Todd Duncan Arrives For Tour Of Dominion
The word “opera" applied to Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” kept common people away from the show for about six years, Mr Todd Duncan, the negro baritone, said when he arrived in Christchurch yesterday from Australia on the first stage of his New Zealand tour. Mr Duncan was chosen by George Gershwin to play the part of Porgy when the show opened on Broadway in 1935. "We played on Broadway for four or five months and then in Chicago, Boston, Cleveland and Pittsburg and some other cities,” Mr Duncan said. “The critics thought it was marvellous but we could not get the common people there because Gershwin insisted on using the word ‘opera’ in connexion with it. "When we revived it in 1941 we dropped the word ‘opera,’ and I did 1200 performances then,” he said. His comment on the film was that it was a "bad version.” Mr Duncan knew Gershwin very well and for some time lived with him. “It was nothing for Gersh-
win to stay up all night composing, I have never seen a man work so hard,’’ he said. “He was very fond of clothes, and dressed impeccme because I was not interested in clothes. “Gershwin had a fantastic genius for finding the inner harmony and pulse of the negro—he was not interested in the Hollywood or the Harlem negro but the simple ones. He did not like music to be bastardised. “I think Gershwin has had more influence and carried more weight with American composers than any other this century,’’ Mr Duncan said. Asked about music being written in the United States at present, Mr Duncan said: “Most of it I do not understand. I am not a modernist. I think that musically I am still in the nineteenth century.’’ Mr Duncan's accompanist is Mr George Malloy, who has worked with him for the last eight years. After his month’s tour of New Zealand Mr Duncan will go to Australia for concerts and then home to Washington, D.C., for a rest
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Press, Volume C, Issue 29506, 6 May 1961, Page 9
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343Todd Duncan Arrives For Tour Of Dominion Press, Volume C, Issue 29506, 6 May 1961, Page 9
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