Here is something I never expected to hear – one of the most significant 20th-century opera productions, caught live and in amazingly vivid sound. In 1952 the US State Department funded a world tour of Porgy and Bess. The production by Everyman Opera eventually visited cities across the American continent, north and south, and gave the British, French, Italian, German, Czech and Russian premieres of Gershwin’s opera. The tour inspired two famous memoirs, Truman Capote’s The Muses are Heard and Maya Angelou’s Singin’ and Swingin’ and Getting Merry Like Christmas. Both writers pay tribute to the array of talent the company possessed, from the veteran Cab Calloway as Sportin’ Life to the then-unknown Leontyne Price as Bess.

Several years later Price and William Warfield recorded a disc of highlights, in which Price sings not only Bess but also Clara and Serena. Fine though that selection is (RCA), it has none of the immediacy and energy of this broadcast from Berlin in September 1952. By then the company had lived with the work for a year. There is a degree of improvisation from the chorus, the famous Eva Jessye Choir, as they enter into the spirit of the drama. Although it is a fairly complete version of the score, there are some cuts (for instance the Buzzard song), but where authentic performance practice is concerned this wins over every other recording.

William Warfield’s Porgy is a noble achievement: as Angelou described him, “he dragged the audience into his despair…his resonant voice straddled the music as he rode it”. Price’s voice is at its youthful best – this is one of the earliest examples of her art on disc. In “What you want wid Bess?” and “I wants to stay here” she proves her star quality as well as her emotional commitment. Helen Colbert as Clara opens the proceedings with a lush “Summertime” and Helen Thigpen rings the Berlin rafters with “My man’s gone now”. John McCurry is a fierce Crown, as Capote noted, “high and heavy and somewhat forbidding”.

The original tape has been made available from the collection of Enno Riekena. The sound is clear, well defined; the recording favours the voices, but Alexander Smallens, who conducted the first performance in 1935, somehow persuades some really hot playing from the RIAS Light Orchestra.

In those crucial cameos, Helen Dowdy hollers the Strawberry Woman’s cry, and Ray Yates is the irresistible Crab Man (both created the roles). Cab Calloway’s insinuating manner is just as effective in “It ain’t necessarily so” as it had been decades earlier in “Kicking the Gong Around”. Some of the soloists are uncredited – who is the feisty Maria?

No one who admires Gershwin’s work should ignore this unique document. As Angelou put it: “Even the chorus performed with such verve that a viewer could easily believe each singer was competing for a leading part.”