Porgy & Bess Jazz Club, the opera

opéra / bordeaux / spectacle / incontournable

4 - 6 December

Discover the Bordeaux National Opera's event show for the 2025-2026 season.

This season's must-see opera

Porgy and Bess takes us to the underbelly of an African-American town in South Carolina. Love rubs shoulders with crime and misery. Although Gershwin's opera was first performed in 1935, and the melody Summertime soon flooded the jazz clubs, it was not until the end of the century that the work established itself as a pillar of the operatic repertoire. In this adaptation of Gershwin's masterpiece, conceived specifically for the Auditorium and the Opéra National de Bordeaux Chorus by Emmanuelle Bastet, the Charleston slums of the 1920s are far away. Swing, blues and negro spirituals are brought to life by a cast of twenty colorful characters in a 1950s jazz club. At Porgy & Bess Jazz Club, we sing, we play, we laugh, we swing, we mourn, but above all we follow the moving figure of Bess, the beautiful coach, around whom three men gravitate.

Around the show

• Thursday, December 4, 6:30 p.m.: Meeting with Emmanuelle Bastet, Auditorium - Intermission bar