Program Notes
September 20, 2008 – Made in the USA
George Gershwin – An American in Paris
During his first visit to Paris in 1923, George Gershwin reportedly exclaimed to his two tour-guides, "Why, this is a city you can write about!"
Gershwin kept his word some five years and two visits later, with An American in Paris. Originally conceived in two versions -- one for solo piano and a second for two pianos -- the work took shape primarily during Gershwin's 1928 visit to Europe, during which he visited most of Europe's most prominent composers, including Ravel, Milhaud, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Berg. As was typical for the gregarious composer, Gershwin played the work-in-progress for most of his musical peers, who greeted it with a range of comments. Ravel liked it. Prokofiev thought it had some potential. Vernon Duke didn't. And Poulenc proclaimed it his favorite 20th century classical composition.
The range of comments were echoed when the work premiered by the New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra later that year. The New York Telegram proclaimed the work "so dull, patchy, thin, vulgar, long-winded and inane that the average movie audience would be bored by it into the open remonstrance." The Musical Courier, however, found a good deal more to like, and compared it to Hector Berlioz's Roman Carnival and Chabrier's España.
Time has been kind to the work, and it has found a place in the repertoire on both sides of the Atlantic. It is surely Gershwin's most carefree, light-hearted work for the concert hall. The walking rhythm with which the work begins bursts with energy, as if the protagonist is about to break into a carefree skip. The work is riddled with playful asides, such as the incorporation of taxi horns and impressionistic bursts of instrumental squawking, plinking, and laughing. The use of polytonal chord sequences and other modernisms almost go unnoticed, so naturally do they fit into the overall texture of the work.
Leroy Anderson – Piano Concerto
According to the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, the term “fiddle-faddle” means “nonsense; something trivial.” For nearly half a century in the classical music world, the music of American composer Leroy Anderson has been associated with that term – and not just because his short orchestral composition, Fiddle Faddle, has become a standard of orchestral pops concerts. Anderson’s musical spirit – carefree, humorous, sentimental and melodious – seemed for many years at odds with the gravely serious idiom of modern classical music.
Thank goodness the times have changed. Nowadays, with consonant harmonies and hummable melodies once again in vogue (thanks to the success of modern composers like John Adams, Arvo Part, and Osvoldo Golijov), Anderson’s music is being re-examined by those who once rejected it as “classical-lite.”
The prime beneficiary of this new appreciation has been Anderson’s Piano Concerto, written in 1953. The work was an ambitious step for the composer, who was by then a pop sensation thanks to compositions such as Blue Tango (which was the first instrumental composition to ever sell a million copies on record), Sleigh Ride (which stands today as the most predictable inclusion on any holiday pops concert), the aforementioned Fiddle Faddle, and The Syncopated Clock.
Never before had Anderson tried such a long-form composition; and apparently he wasn’t pleased with the results. After he conducted the first two performances of his Piano Concerto in Cleveland and Chicago, he withdrew the work, believing it suffered from structural problems.
However, in the early 1970s, he re-approached the work, according to his wife, Eleanor. She later relayed to the New York Times that Leroy told her, "That's not bad; maybe I should do something with it.”
Unfortunately, Leroy Anderson died of cancer in 1975 without having officially sanctioned new performances of the work. That was left to Eleanor, who, responding to interest from scholars and fans of her husband’s music, allowed the work to be published in 1988.
Since then, Anderson’s Piano Concerto has rapidly earned interest around the country – thanks, in no small part, to the efforts of tonight’s soloist, Jeffrey Biegel. Biegel performed the New York premiere of the piece at Carnegie Hall in 1994; he has since performed it far and wide (even in Turkey), and he recorded it with Leonard Slatkin and the BBC Concert Orchestra.
Why? Well, the answer should be evident on first listen. Imbued with beautiful melodies and upbeat, energetic orchestral accompaniment, Anderson’s Piano Concerto successfully bridges the surface character of light, “pops” music with the complex structures and technical virtuosity that typify the great concertos of the classical repertoire.
Aaron Copland – Appalachian Spring
Aaron Copland is widely regarded, both in America and abroad, as this country's greatest orchestral composer, past or present. Born in the first year of the new century, Copland led a new wave of composers who transcended the European roots of orchestral music and created a vital voice for America in concert halls around the world.
Copland was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 14, 1900, the son of Russian-Jewish parents. As a young composer, he was anxious to write in a style "that would immediately be recognized as American in character."
However, as he developed his artistic voice, Copland became aware of a more fundamental challenge facing composers of the day.
"I began to feel an increasing dissatisfaction with the relations of the music-loving public and the living composers. The old 'special' public of the modern music concerts had fallen away, and the conventional concert public continued apathetic or indifferent to anything but the established classics. It seemed to me that we composers were in danger of working in a vacuum."
Copland therefore endeavored to write music which would appeal to a broad audience, and to reach listeners through new means: he wrote an operetta for schoolchildren, composed music for radio, and became one of Hollywood's most celebrated film music writers.
Copland's emphasis on clarity and functionality served to frame music which is incredibly rich in melody, harmony and character. Perhaps nowhere in his considerable output is this richness more evident than in Copland's most well-known work, Appalachian Spring. Composed in 1944 for the great choreographer Martha Graham, Appalachian Spring was the last of a trio of major ballet scores produced by Copland during the years 1938-1944 (the other two works, Billy the Kid and Rodeo, are also widely recognized and performed around the world).
Based on a traditional Shaker melody titled "Simple Gifts," Appalachian Spring captures the essence of the bounty of spring--the blooming flowers, the rich scents and the spirit of growth. Building to a powerful climax, the work ends on a tranquil note, as the season gives in to the laziness of summer.
George Gershwin – Rhapsody in Blue
In ways, George Gershwin was the Rodney Dangerfield of his time: No matter what he did, he just couldn’t get no respect. Despite a string of popular successes, George Gershwin sustained a nagging reputation during his lifetime as little more than a Tin Pan Alley song-spinner -- a talented tunesmith, but little more.
But in posterity, Gershwin had the last laugh. While much of the music of his more “serious” classical contemporaries still waits to spill out of the concert halls and into the popular consciousness, Gershwin is now internationally recognized as the most important early-20th Century voice in American art music. In the words of Irving Berlin -- himself one of the most beloved songwriters of the 20th Century -- “the rest of us were songwriters. George was a composer.”
To be sure, Gershwin was primarily a populist. His first hit was the song, “Swanee,” which was recorded by Al Jolsen in 1920; it quickly sold more than 2 million records and a million copies of the sheet music, cementing Gershwin's reputation as a songwriter (and relieving him thereafter of ever having to worry about money). A long string of hits followed, ranging from catchy anthems (“I Got Plenty O' Nuttin',” “It Ain't Necessarily So”) to jazzy melodies (“Fascinating Rhythm,” “'S Wonderful”) to lilting ballads (“Summertime,” “Bess, You Is My Woman Now”).
In 1924, Gershwin had his first major breakthrough into the world of 'serious' music with the now-classic Rhapsody in Blue for piano and jazz orchestra. This was a time when Gershwin's reputation as a songwriter was working hard against him with serious art critics. Making things worse, Rhapsody in Blue married jazz idioms with classical forms -- a marriage decried as unholy by prominent critics of the day. It didn't help that Gershwin had called on composer/conductor Ferde Grofè to orchestrate the Rhapsody. Word had it that Gershwin didn't know how to score his own works.
Nevertheless, the work was an immediate hit with audiences, and many critics quickly came around to realize its brilliance. During the next ten years, Gershwin earned more than a quarter of a million dollars in royalties for performances, recordings and rental fees for Rhapsody in Blue. Today, this work stands as a monument of early-20th Century artistry, and a watershed that transformed the reputation of jazz from decadent bar-music, to America's greatest native art form.
Gershwin, together with the critic Deems Taylor, penned a fairly specific program to describe the various episodes of the work. "My purpose here is to portray the impression of an American visitor in Paris as he strolls about the city and listens to various street noises and absorbs the French atmosphere," Gershwin wrote. Those impressions are almost pictorial in the upbeat beginning of the composition, with its honking taxi-horns. A shift into blues stylings partway through the piece depicts a moment when the imagined protagonist "has succumbed to a spasm of homesickness." But soon enough, the charms of Paris win out again, and "the street noises and French atmosphere are triumphant."
Program notes written by Joe Nickell |
