The Story So Far:
Ethan Iverson, “The Worst Masterpiece: ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ at 100” (The New York Times, January 26, 2024)
Will Friedwald, “Composed in 1924, George Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ Stands Tall to This Day” (The New York Sun, February 9, 2024)
John McWhorter, “No, ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ Is Not ‘the Worst’” (The New York Times, February 8, 2024)
The Park Avenue Chamber Symphony returns to the DiMenna Center for Classical Music with a program of Wagner and Brahms on Saturday May 18.
Maybe it’s part of the genius of George Gershwin that, 85 years after he died at the age of 38 in 1937, his music still inspires controversy and provokes a discussion. There’s nothing about him that’s a given - our greatest mistake would be to take him for granted.
Case in point: the essay by jazz pianist and composer Ethan Iverson that ran in the New York Times a few weeks ago that made the case for characterizing “Rhapsody in Blue” as “the worst masterpiece.” This provoked a vast outcry, and I’ll just mention two of the many responses, my own in the New York Sun, and that of the highly-respected professor of linguistics and musician John McWhorter, appropriately in the pages of the great Gray Lady herself, both of which ran last Friday.
This weekend, the rubber hit the road: on the occasion of the centennial of the Rhapsody, there were two major performances by New York-based orchestras, the New York Pops, with the estimable Lee Musicker playing the central piano role at Carnegie Hall, and the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony directed by David Bernard, with Ted Rosenthal at the keyboard, at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music on West 37th Street.
In his introductions, Mr. Bernard made the point that Gershwin’s overwhelming success as both a composer and a songwriter has often been held against him - more than one critic of “serious” music has “penalized” the late composer for being “too popular.” And that speaks to Mr. Iverson’s point that the Rhapsody is perhaps played too often - it’s ubiquitous even in commercials, and as “airplane” music on United Airlines flights, it’s become a sort of stratospheric elevator music. Perhaps we would appreciate the Rhapsody more - as a work to compare with Ravel, Debussy, or Bartok (not to mention Ellington or Mary Lou Williams) - if we heard it less.
This was my introduction to the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony and what Mr. Bernard calls the “InsideOut” mode of presentation: the audience and the orchestra are interspersed with each other - I sat with the violins to my right, the violas and cellos to my left, and the woodwinds, brass, and percussion behind me. This “immersive” approach to music is quite remarkable, unlike anything I have ever experienced before.
The concert on Saturday evening, Centenary In Blue, began with two classic songs as arranged by the greatest of all pop music maestros, Nelson Riddle, for the 1959 Ella Fitzgerald sings the George and Ira Gershwin Songbook. “Love is Here to Stay” and “Someone to Watch Over Me” were both well sung by soprano Sarah Ellis - who is to be commended for not trying to mimic the iconic Ella - although the main attraction was hearing those amazing Riddle orchestrations played live.
Mr. Bernard represented Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess with a 13-minute version of Porgy and Bess: Selection for Orchestra, one of several instrumental suites drawn from the opera by Robert Russell Bennett. I would have personally preferred Gershwin’s own approach to the same idea, the 1936 Catfish Row, which is the composer’s more radical and dramatic approach to his own work, but the Russell Selection is quite lovely, and certainly extols the beauty of the major songs in the work.
Ted Rosenthal has had the honor of performing the Rhapsody in major New York concerts to celebrate both the 90th anniversary, as he did in February 2014 at Town Hall, and now again for the centenary. Ten years ago, he played the original 1924 Ferde Grofé orchestration for the Paul Whiteman Orchestra; yesterday it was a later orchestration but one that was very much approved and performed by the composer himself. Mr. Rosenthal made this one of the more memorable performances of the many I’ve heard of the Rhapsody by not sticking to the piano part precisely as in the published edition, but by making embellishments and minor changes that were very much in the Gershwin wheelhouse. Notably, he inserted a wholly original syncopated blues interlude in a syncopated 1924 style that aligns Gershwin more sympathetically with James P. Johnson and the great Harlem stride masters. At 22 minutes long, this wasn’t your standard economy or even business-class Rhapsody.
As great as this particular Rhapsody was, the highlight and the climax was An American in Paris (1928). Most of us have grown up with this 1928 concert work as a kind of Broadway ballet, a background for Gene Kelly in Vincente Minnelli’s landmark 1951 movie musical of the same title. As Mr. Bernard explained, American in Paris had been reworked by arranger Campbell Watson for the 1945 Warner Bros. Gershwin biopic, A Rhapsody in Blue and then was further smoothed out by Johnny Green for Minnelli and Kelly.
The original American in Paris is such a different animal that despite my intrinsic familiarity with the movie versions, and except for a few themes here and there such as the slow “blues” theme, I wouldn’t have recognized most of it. The most basic difference is that, as originally written by Gershwin - and documented in a 1929 recording that he participated in and approved of - although it’s in a regular rhythm throughout, it is essentially not a background for dancing. It’s a literal, jazz-influenced symphonic depiction of Paris between the wars, encompassing all the chaos, randomness, and high drama of contemporary urban life. One theme comes at you this way, another from the other way, an experience that was much enhanced by the immersive placement of the orchestra, as well as by the use of taxi horns, heard here, as Mr. Bernard explained, in the correct pitches that the composer intended.
(I would love to hear the PACS tackle the lesser-heard Second Rhapsody, aka The New York Rhapsody, in this immersive fashion. Actually, given where the DiMenna Center is geographically located, they should perform Richard Rodgers’s ballet, Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.)
To summarize, David Bernard and the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony played four segments of Gershwin, in two of which he leaned into later reinterpretations, by Nelson Riddle and Robert Russell Bennett, but for the other two, the idea was to come as close as possible to the composer’s own original intentions. Rhapsody in Blue and American in Paris are two pieces I know by heart - I could hum them both from beginning to end - and yet for all the many reinterpretations over the decades - and this certainly also applies to Catfish Row - the most radical visions of Gershwin’s masterworks are invariably his own.
The Park Avenue Chamber Symphony returns to the DiMenna Center for Classical Music with a program of Wagner and Brahms on Saturday May 18.
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I’d sure like to hear an inside-out concert, or should I say take part in one. The experience could not be reproduced for a home audience, even mastering for surround sound…
Not a fan of the 1951 ballet version of "American." TBH, I'm not a fan of the whole film, which succumbs too hard (IMO) to Kelly's getting artsy-fartsy. I much prefer the version from the stage adaptation, which I feel adheres more closely to the original.