Pianist, Singers Bring Gershwin Joyfully Alive

George Gershwin is an American icon not hitherto associated with Halloween. Still, Saturday night’s “Gershwin by Request” program at Orange Coast College’s Robert Moore Theatre proved all treats and no tricks.

The Costa Mesa show clearly belonged to pianist Leon Bates, long a noted specialist in this music. Bates opened and closed authoritatively, and his accompaniments for generous excerpts from “Porgy and Bess” were just where they had to be in dynamic balance and rhythmic point.

Bates began with the “Three Preludes.” Though brimming with well-motivated energy, his playing had a veiled, liquid character that made the works sound like the Ravel that Gershwin so admired. That this was a matter of interpretive touch was apparent from the following group of Gershwin’s rollicking arrangements of his own songs, which Bates made brighter and edgier than the “Preludes.”

Three more robust arrangements, including an “I Got Rhythm” of almost Lisztian invention and virtuosity, launched the second half of the program. Bates saved the inevitable “Rhapsody in Blue” for his finale. Intelligent affection was everywhere apparent in his joyful solo version (not as radical as Marcus Roberts’ approach but distinctive and forceful nonetheless).

“Porgy and Bess” of late has been as carefully reconsidered as “Rhapsody in Blue.” Soprano Sebronette Barnes and bass-baritone Benjamin Matthews--big voices, big vibratos--took the black-tie, fully operatic road, outsized in sound and expression.

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Barnes has the leaner voice of the two and had more trouble with textual clarity, soft and high. Her “Summertime” was a quavery cliche, but she produced an astonishingly seductive “Strawberry Chant,” the name of the fruit sinuously caressed, then tartly slapped.

Matthews lavished waves of deep, warm sound on his Porgy assignments, which he also sang with a firm sense of character. His duets with Barnes, though dramatically enacted, were musically blurred by the competing vibratos.

There were no encores, but each also sang a Gershwin hit, Barnes a fragile “Embraceable You” and Matthews a tenderly ecstatic “Love Walked In.”