Overture Magazine - 2018-19 Season BSO_Overture_MAR_APR | Page 33

PORGY AND BESS
Larry Hylton
Sportin’ Life
Larry D. Hylton is an
American tenor who
has inspired audiences
around the world. A
graduate of the Duke Ellington School
of the Arts in Washington, D.C.,
Hylton studied voice with Jackson
Sheats, Charlotte Black, Samuel Bonds
and Betty Ridgeway.
Hylton has appeared around the
world with many reputable companies,
including the Metropolitan Opera, Opéra
National de Lyon, Opéra de Montréal and
the Edinburgh International Festival.
While Hylton is widely known
for his portrayal of Sportin’ Life in
Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, his other
credits include Carmen Jones under the
baton of Plácido Domingo, Sweeney Todd,
Debbie Allen’s Soul Possessed and Black
Nativity. In 2015 Larry debuted the role
of Prince in Ricky Ian Gordon’s Morning
Star produced by the Cincinnati Opera.
Venturing into independent film,
Hylton supplied vocals for the 2015
documentary Seeking Asylum produced
by Evolutionary Press.
Hylton currently resides in New
York City, where he is a staff musician
at the historic Abyssinian Baptist
Church in Harlem.
Larry Hylton last appeared with the BSO in
July 2016 performing in the Star-Spangled
Spectacular, Nicholas Hersh, conductor.
[He reprises his role as Sportin’ Life from
the BSO’s 2016 production.]
Reyna Carguill
Serena
A native of Panama
City, Reyna Carguill
has appeared in
performances
throughout the U.S. and abroad.
Recent highlights include the role of
Élisabeth de Valois in Don Carlos and
Lucrezia Contarini in I Due Foscari
with Sarasota Opera.
Carguill toured the U.S. with the
75 th Anniversary Production of Gershwin’s
Porgy and Bess in the role of Serena. In
2014 she sang the role of Serena to great
acclaim with the Princeton Festival of
New Jersey’s production of Porgy and
Bess and Leonora in Il Trovatore for
Sarasota Opera.
On the concert platform, Carguill
has sung Britten’s War Requiem in a
performance with the Indianapolis
Symphonic Choir, Mahler’s Symphony
No. 2 with conductor David Effron and
Vaughan Williams’ Serenade to Music
with conductor Raymond Leppard.
While completing a bachelor’s degree
in Vocal Performance from Oakwood
College in Huntsville, AL, Carguill
studied with Ginger Beazley. At Indiana
University, Carguill studied with soprano
Virginia Zeani. She is also a recipient of a
Richard F. Gold Career Grant.
Reyna Carguill makes her BSO debut.
Jasmine
Habersham
Clara
American soprano
Jasmine Habersham
most recently
performed the role of Pip in Moby
Dick with Utah Opera, Pamina in The
Magic Flute with Opera Theatre of
St. Louis: Opera on the Go, Papagena
in The Magic Flute with Cincinnati
Opera, Yum-Yum in The Mikado with
Kentucky Opera, Esther in Intimate
Apparel with Cincinnati Opera Fusion
and Clara in Porgy and Bess with
Utah Festival Opera. As a member
of the Glimmerglass Festival she
performed the roles of Papagena
in The Magic Flute and an Apparition
in Macbeth. In concert she has
performed Szymanowski’s Stabat Mater,
Schubert’s Mass in G, Bach’s Mass
in B Minor, Handel’s Messiah and
Duke Ellington’s Concert of Sacred
Music. Additional performances for the
2018 –19 season include a reprisal of Pip
in Moby Dick with Opera San Jose and
the role of Katie Jackson in the world
premiere of Joel Puckett’s The Fix with
Minnesota Opera.  
Jasmine Habersham makes her BSO debut.

About the Concert
PORGY AND BESS
George Gershwin
Born in Brooklyn, NY, September 26, 1898;
died in Beverly Hills, CA, July 11, 1937
On an October night in 1926, George
Gershwin, wound up from rehearsals of
his Broadway-bound musical Oh! Kay,
found himself unable to sleep. At 28,
he was the toast of American music.
He had created the scores of numerous
hit Broadway shows and was already
considered one of the country’s best
songwriters. But he was a restless artist,
always looking for new challenges. In
1924, he had brilliantly mingled jazz and
classical idioms in his Rhapsody in Blue
and followed it with the full-length Piano
Concerto in F the next year. And he
dreamed of someday crossing over from
the world of musical comedy he had
already mastered to create a full-fledged
American opera.
That night, Gershwin turned to
a popular new novel, Porgy, about
African-American life in the Charleston
ghetto by a white South Carolinian
named DuBose Heyward. The
composer was enthralled and read until
dawn. His savvy theatrical sense told
him this was a story crying out for
dramatic treatment, and he promptly
fired off a letter to Heyward expressing
his interest in using it for a future opera.
But Gershwin admitted he did not feel
he had the technical knowledge yet
to tackle such an ambitious project.
It would be another nine years before
Porgy and Bess had its premiere.
The scion of an aristocratic but
impoverished Charleston family,
Heyward had spent time as a cotton
checker working among black stevedores
on the Charleston wharves. He found
himself mesmerized by “the color, the
mystery and movement of Negro life.”
Just down the street from his home
was a decaying courtyard of tenements
called Cabbage Row, which became the
Catfish Row of his novel and play. The
inspiration for the crippled Porgy was a
real-life local character Samuel Smalls,
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