"Porgy and Bess" by George Gershwin opened Friday at Houston Grand Opera, with a series of 12 performances by Feb. 11. "Porgy" will then tour 10 co-producing American companies - Dallas, San Diego, Seattle, Cleveland, Minneapolis Performing Arts, Florida Grand, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Orange County and Portland operas, concluding July 30. A tour of Japan is scheduled for January and February 1996.
The production stars Marquita Lister, remembered in Salt Lake City for her recent Aida with Utah Opera. Also starring are Alvy Powell and Terry Cook (Utah Symphony soloist) as Porgy, Larry Marshall as Sportin' Life and Stacey Robinson as Crown, along with many other prominent black singers. Music direction is by John DeMain, staging by Hope Clarke.- IN TEL AVIV, a new opera house opened last fall - a showplace on which $50 million was expended despite the Israeli city's $350 million deficit. "Culture for us is not a luxury," said Shlomo Lahat, mayor of Tel Aviv. "It is a life-or-death matter."
The house was opened with a production of Moussorgsky's "Boris Godounov" starring Russian bass Paata Burchuladze, and a gala concert the following night with Eva Marton and Simon Estes. Resident company will be the New Israeli Opera Company, with international guest stars. A visit from Hamburg Staatsoper is scheduled in the spring.
- OPERA DE LYON of France will travel to the San Francisco Bay Area, bringing 11 performances, June 17-30, for its first United States visit. The 280-member company will include soloists, the Orchestra and Chorus of Opera de Lyon, and Opera Ballet. The visit is part of the 50th anniversary celebration of the signing of the U.N. charter, which took place June 26, 1945, in the Veterans Building, War Memorial, in San Francisco.
Opera de Lyon has the support of the French government and private French corporations. Opera de Lyon's beginnings date to the year 1688. In 1993, the company re-dedicated its newly designed theater.
California-born Kent Nagano, formerly conductor of the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, will lead all nine Opera de Lyon performances. Since he was named music director of the Lyon company in 1988, he has won international acclaim including several award-winning recordings.
Performances by the company will include Prokofiev's opera "L'Amour de trois Oranges," in the War Memorial Opera House June 17, 18, 21 and 22; Prokofiev's ballet "Romeo and Juliet" in Zellerbach Hall at University of California at Berkeley, June 19 and 20; "An American Evening" by the Lyon Opera Ballet, June 23 and 24 in Zellerbach Hall; Berlioz's "Damnation of Faust," a free concert at Stern Grove, sponsored by the Stern Grove Festival Association; and Puccini's "Madama Butterfly," a production created almost entirely by Japanese artists, at Zellerbach Hall, June 28 and 30.
- CITIZENS OF GALVESTON, Texas, celebrated the Grand 1894 Opera House early in 1995. From a grimy, leaky, moldy former movie house in 1974, the Grand has blossomed into one of the premier restored historic theaters in America.
Hundreds of stars, including such loyal present-day rooters as Hal Holbrook, Harry Belafonte and Steve Gatlin, have trod the boards at the Grand since its opening in 1895, when a 16-piece symphony orchestra played a series of overtures, and a play called "Daughters of Eve" followed.
The list of stars who appeared at the Grand is phenomenal: George M. Cohan, Sarah Bernhardt, Al Jolson, John Philip Sousa, Anna Pavlova, Rudolph Nureyev, the Polish-born tragic actress Madame Modjeska and her countryman, pianist Ignace Jan Paderewski.
William Jennings Bryan repeated his famous "Cross of Gold" speech in the theater. The Marx Brothers, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme performed there. So did Dorothy Kirsten, Helen Hayes, Sarah Vaughan, Lionel Barrymore and Lionel Hampton. Tex Ritter rode his horse, White Flash, through the lobby, down the aisle and onto the stage.
The Galveston County Cultural Arts Council bought the theater in 1974. The first big donations to the restoration project came from the Houston Endowment and Galveston's Harris and Eliza Kempner Fund. Total restoration cost $8 million.
- THE LATE GERDA LISSNER, an opera enthusiast, noted the rarity of great opera voices in our times and decided to establish a scheme to help exceptional beginners develop their talent. On her death last year, the Gerda Lissner Foundation, funded from her estate with a capital base of nearly $10 million, came into being for this purpose. The foundation says it will use the interest from the capital, some $450,000 annually, to search out undiscovered singers of great promise, particularly women, and pay for the specific assistance they need after their completion of voice study.