Shanghai Symphony Orchestra premiered a new production of George Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess on Oct 8 under the baton of US conductor Kazem Abdullah.

The semi-staged production was jointly produced by SSO, Beijing Music Festival, the Cape Town Opera House in South Africa, and KT Wong Foundation. It will have another two performances in Beijing on Oct 12 and 13, as the closing show of the 27th Beijing Music Festival.

This is the first time Abdullah conducted a full-scale production of Porgy and Bess, and he said "there's a dynamism in Gershwin's music that is not just oral but also visual. I think having the orchestra on stage, one sort of sees how the instrumentation of the various groups, streams, brass, winds, percussion, how they relate to the characters on stage in this semi-staged production."

More than 40 members of the Capetown Opera Chorus, recipients of the International Opera Award for best chorus, flew to China to perform in the show, alongside soprano Nonhlanhla Yende playing the heroine Bess, and bass singer Otto Maidi playing the hero Porgy.

According to Magdalene Minnaar, artistic director of the Cape Town Opera, "Cape Town Opera's superpower is that our chorus is almost like a chorus of soloists. And we have these phenomenal voices in South Africa. I am hoping that the Chinese audience will be amazed by the singing of our people from South Africa."

She went on to say that Shanghai Symphony Orchestra is an absolutely world-class orchestra, adding "it is fantastic to see how they are handling this music that is very much, I think, outside of the natural habitat. It feels that Gershwin is on the other side of the continent and they play it so beautifully with so much emotion and it is absolutely exquisite to listen to this beautiful acoustic."