..:: audio-music dot info ::..


Main Page      The Desert Island      Copyright Notice
 Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz


George Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Decca Classics
Released: 2011.02.01
Time:
 73:35
Category: Classics
Producer(s): Andrew Cornall
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.deccaclassics.com
Appears with:
Purchase date: 2012
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


          George Gershwin (1898 - 1937)
[1] Rhapsody in Blue - 16:12
     "Porgy and Bess" Suite (Catfish Row)
[2] Catfish Row - 6:18
[3] Porgy Sings - 4:38
[4] Fugue -1:52
[5] Hurricane - 3:39
[6] Good Morning, Brother (Sistuh) - 7:18
     Concerto in F
[7] 1. Allegro - 12:17
[8] 2. Adagio - 10:16
[9] 3. Allegro agitato - 6:29

          George Gershwin (1898 - 1937) & Walter Donaldson (1893 - 1947)
[10] Rialto Ripples (Rag) - 4:36

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Stefano Bollani - Piano on [1]

Gewandhausorchester Leipzig - Orchestra on [1-10]
Riccardo Chailly - Conductor on [1-10]
Ferde Grofé - Orchestration on [1-10]
William Ryden - Arranger on [1-10]

Frank-Michael Erben - Violin on [10]
Thomas Hipper - Oboe on [10]
Gundel Jannemann-Fischer - Horn on [10]
Julian Sommerhalder - Trumpet on [10]
Jurnjakob Timm - Cello on [10]
Josef Christof - Orchestral Keyboards on [10]
Thomas Ziesch - Clarinet  on [10]

Andrew Cornall - Recording Producer
Mirko Gratton - Executive Producer
Giuseppe Facchinetti - Production Assistant
Ian Watson - Assistant Engineer, Editing
Philip Siney - Engineer
Eike Boehm - Assistant Engineer
Thomas Haendel - Assistant Engineer
Jenni Whiteside - Editing
Steven D. Bowen - Music Editor
Frank Campbell Watson - Music Editor
Gert Mothes - Photography
Gian Mario Benzing - Interviewer, Liner Notes
Kenneth Chalmers - Liner Note Translation

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


2011 CD Decca - DDD 0289 478 2739 9 DH

With this recording of the Rhapsody in Blue and the Concerto in F, Riccardo Chailly blends the classical elegance and sophistication of the Gewandhaus Orchestra with the jazz/blues sensibility of the mercurial Milan-born jazz legend Stefano Bollani. The Rhapsody was performed in the jazz-band version (orchestrated by Paul Whiteman), while the Concerto was in Gershwin’s original symphonic orchestration. Completing the well-filled album (over 73 minutes) are the symphonic suite Catfish Row – derived from Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess – and Gershwin’s earliest significant work, the Broadway-inspired rag Rialto Ripples.



Among the hundreds or thousands of recordings of Gershwin favorites on the market, it's difficult to stand out. But this big-budget European release manages to do it. Even if it's not uniformly successful, there's a feeling of appreciation for Gershwin's music here that has merit on its own. Instead of trying to blend the classical and jazz elements in Gershwin, conductor Riccardo Chailly takes the novel approach of pushing each of them to extremes and, in various ways, keeping them separate. He generally -- most noticeably in the Piano Concerto in F -- scales back the freedom of tempo that's usual in Gershwin. Working with not just an established European orchestra but the granddaddy of them all, the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig, Chailly, seems to generate rapport with the musicians, perhaps because they're not forced to move too far out of their rhythmic comfort zone. Yet these aren't carefully controlled, non-jazzy readings of the sort one sometimes hears from Europe, and, for that matter, the U.S. For all Gershwin's jazz roots, the Rhapsody in Blue has not commonly been recorded by jazz pianists in its original form (although they've certainly used the work as a stimulus to further creative activity). The presence of Italian jazz pianist Stefano Bollani, joining Gewandhaus members in the 1924 "jazz band" scoring of the work by Ferde Grofé, results in an excellent, sparse reading of the score that reveals its small details and is intelligently enhanced by a modest amount of improvisation (justifiable in that Gershwin didn't write the piano part down, as he played it, until after the first performance). The Piano Concerto in F also receives a crisp, astringent but crystal-clear interpretation, and Bollani has improvisatory fun with the early Gershwin/Will Donaldson rag Rialto Ripples. On the symphonic suite Catfish Row, drawn on Porgy and Bess, Bollani does not play the orchestral piano part; the reading is all Chailly's, and it lurches oddly between fixed tempos and a bit of swing added to the rhythms; the naturalness of Gershwin's melodies goes missing. On balance, Gershwin fans will want this recording for the fresh Rhapsody in Blue alone.

James Manheim - All Music Guide




For almost a century, Gershwin's music has come to be surrounded by an accumulation of analysis, examination and even polemics. Now another opportunity has arisen to explore the question of its eclecticism, and its dual nature - halfway between classical music and jazz, between the serious and the popular traditions - and this time it promises to be cleared up once and for all. An orchestra, and not just any "classical" orchestra, but the Gewandhausorchester in Leipzig, one of the glories of the classical world, which numbers Mendelssohn, Furtwängler and Bruno Walter among its past luminaries, has made a recording of the composer's music. At the piano is a musician with a strictly jazz background, Stefano Bollani, and on the podium is a conductor, Riccardo Chailly, who has championed the masterpieces of twentieth-century music, plumbed the depths of Mahlerian anxiety, and taken a responsive, fresh approach to Bach. Gershwin's music stands at the junction of many paths, and a discussion with Chailly and Bollani helps with understanding the different directions they come from, and whether the apparent mountain peaks or river valleys that mark their boundaries are merely figments of our imagination.

Riccardo Chailly: As far as I'm concerned, the Concerto in F has a greatness and a diffi-culty that make it comparable to Stravinsky.

Why Stravinsky, exactly?

RC: The piece is Neo-classical in form, and the thing I want to do is restore the Concerto's Neo-classical structure. Gershwin feels close in spirit to Stravinsky to me, in terms of the sound-world, the orchestration and the constant search for a different world of rhythm. With Stefano Bollani we have tried to restore this formal rigour much more than is usually the case in the performing tradition.

Where can we most expect to hear this "rigour"?

RC: In Gershwin, there's a continual slackening of the basic tempo and a danger of a variable sense of movement: what you have to do instead, depending on the ornaments and the flexibility of the tempo, is maintain a feeling of rubato, in relation to a Haupttakt, the main, established pulse. You can "bend" the tempo within a given bar, but the blues beat is constant. We tried not to get carried away to extremes of freedom, in the first movement and even more in the second (a lazy Après-midi...), maintaining the blues pulse. The finale, on the other hand, is almost all in one tempo, which comes inexorably "crashing down" as I see it. The idea was to arrive on the last page, where the trumpets and the rest of the brass are trilling, as if here the music were a shout that grabs the listener unable to resist the excitement of this raging moto perpetuo any longer.

Stefano Bollani: If there's one thing you can say, it's that our Concerto in F is in time: it doesn't indulge in melancholy, it seems like a ballet with Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire, whom Gershwin actually wrote for...

But what about the sense of swing? How do you square that with the formal rigour?

RC: In America, players ask, "How do you want it, swing or straight?". In the Catfish Row suite, for instance, all the swing rhythms that we recorded don't correspond exactly to the way the music is written, but instead to a long-standing, typically American performing tradition: a rhythmic swing, a sense of magical fluidity, the irrational nature of the fact that you cannot reconcile what you hear with what you see, because it has its roots in a style that transcends notation.

Where is the point of equilibrium in Gershwin between jazz influences and classical am-bitions?

RC: What Gershwin originally wanted to do was to import the language of 1920s jazz into the classical repertoire, but maintaining an idea of freshness, artlessness and poetic immediacy. My interpretation has a direct influence on the type of sound I ask for, and here again the Gewandhaus players responded immediately, with precision and a deep understanding of the style. Right from the first clarinet glissando in the Rhapsody in Blue, you sometimes hear an over-exposed Gershwin. The Gewandhaus, in contrast, preserves Gershwin's spontaneity, the key element in what makes him great. There's no need always to feel tempted to keep doing something different, the piece is so well written that it stands on its own merits. Gershwin is one of those composers who have suffered the most interpretative abuses, like Puccini, like Rachmaninov, and it's no coincidence that both these composers are contemporaries of his: they have suffered from performers taking the wrong approach, arrogantly going for extremes of interpretation that the composers themselves considered wide of the mark.

SB: Over the years, Gershwin has become grander than he was originally, and his music has been performed in a more classical manner. He's ended up by becoming a Romantic. But he's not a Romantic, he's not Brahms, who wants you to dig deep into every bar and wring it dry... To consider Gershwin a great composer you don't have to go all out to find his classical roots, or the improvisatory freedom of jazz.

Nevertheless, there is a constant tendency in the literature on Gershwin to analyse the music with an idea of teasing out his models, pinpointing what he inherited from art-music, from Grieg and beyond...

SB: Gershwin is not someone who was born listening to Grieg; at most he tried it out: he proudly wanted to write the first truly American concerto in history, but I don't hear either Grieg or Mozart in him. Perhaps something of Rachmaninov, but in the sense of a model of a success. For me, Gershwin is very much a kid, he tends to go very much by "inspiration", and I hear a true America in him, in its simplicity.

Is this "national" music?

RC: Gershwin's music comes out of a world that is profoundly American, that of Broadway. That is the environment that Gershwin was born into, and it was his first musical culture. Then all his genius came bursting forth, and now he is not only a classic of American culture, but also one of the giants of the twentieth century. I feel that the melodies collected by Dvorák for his "New World" Symphony are more American in inspiration than those that spring from Gershwin's imagination.

Does the same hold true for the pieces from Porgy and Bess?

RC: In the Catfish Row suite there's even a fugue: you can hear fragments in it that are reminiscent of the Stravinsky of Agon... Here he completely steps away from the "ro-mantic" plushness of the typical Gershwin sound and moves into a highly complex mass of rhythms. Here Gershwin has to show his mastery of counterpoint. And here again his rhythmic sound-world reminds me of late Stravinsky, although it doesn't have the same harmonic boldness.

Your performance here of "Summertime" is very poetic...

RC: A simple melodic line, played by the solo violin, with no trace of self-indulgence. I kept a tempo of q = 72, which seems from the manuscript to be the tempo that Gershwin wanted: relaxed, never grand.

What is left of the authentically jazzy in this music?

RC: We recorded an interesting selection: we play the jazz band version of the Rhapsody, the 1924 one orchestrated by Grofé, with its very curious timbre and an even stronger surface jazz sound than the symphonic version. This makes a contrast with what Gershwin achieves in the Concerto in F, where he demonstrates his complete independence as a composer, able to create an absolutely wonderful piece of scoring, and not only in its rhythmic control and rich dynamic range. If you analyse it in depth, you can see that the writing is full of Nebenstimmen, secondary voices that weave in and out of the principal lines, which is extremely interesting...

And seen instead from the jazz musician's point of view?

SB: It wasn't Gershwin's intention to dress jazz up in its "Sunday best", like other European composers of his time. He liked jazz. If he liked it, why dress it up as something else? What I sense, instead, is a whole range of situations, one of which is jazz. More than making "symphonic jazz", as advertised by Paul Whiteman, Gershwin wanted to create music that was one hundred per cent "American", which is an even more ambitious goal.

A jazz pianist facing a classical orchestra and a "borderline" composer: how did you relate to each other?

SB: Riccardo is also an ex-drummer, which helped me a lot. The problem for me, when I play with a symphony orchestra, is the vocabulary, by which I don't mean musical vocabulary. I mean how you talk about music and how you rehearse in a classical orchestra. To give just one very simple example: when the conductor lowers his arm, then I come in. With a symphony orchestra it doesn't work like that, the gesture comes before the attack, there's a beat between the gesture and the attack. The conductor of a jazz band dances the music, the band plays on his movements. Riccardo was very patient...

Jazz is improvisation: what margin is there here for improvisation?

SB: In the Concerto, I don't improvise a single note. I do in the Rag and in some parts of the Rhapsody, simply because I know that at the premiere Gershwin did so himself: he not only hadn't had time to orchestrate the piece, he hadn't written down the whole piano part. So I took the liberty of improvising some little variations on the theme. The Rhapsody is essentially a sequence of lovely themes that run along one after the other, over a quarter of an hour. And you can play with these themes. I don't want to drag Gershwin over to the side of jazz at all costs. But certainly to the side of lightness.

RC: At the end of Rialto Ripples, which is an exhilarating piece of music written at the age of eighteen on a ragtime rhythm, very much in the style of Scott Joplin, you'll hear Bollani play a free introduction and two other passages that are his, variations on the theme. Then we end with a final whistle from three slide flutes as if to say, "Did you think we were serious?". The whistle goes up and then down, and I say "Auf Wiedersehen!" to the orchestra. But Stefano stays on alone and restarts the Rialto theme in an altered version, finishing up with some other variations. "Stefano, I'm going," I say. And he answers, "Bye, Riccardo. Could you order the linguine for me as well?"...



First the good news: The Gewandhaus Orchestra—at over 260 years old the most venerable of orchestras—knows how to play Gershwin. One shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose. With Harnoncourt, of all conductors, leading a more than creditable Porgy and Read more in Graz, it’s pretty safe to assume the jazz-age idiom has become common heritage. So we have Gershwin from Leipzig now, and while one would never mistake the Gewandhaus Orchestra for a jazz ensemble, that is never quite the point of Gershwin’s orchestral works anyway. So the orchestra maintains its polish—though the brass section does get pretty rowdy at times—and the famous clarinet solo in the Rhapsody does not eclipse memories of Ross Gorman or Al Gallodoro in full cry. Still, Thomas Ziesch starts with a nicely smeared glissando, the trumpets wail or moan soulfully, principal violinist Frank-Martin Erben performs the Summertime solo with feeling and some blue notes, and the orchestra plays throughout with flair and enormous commitment.

It certainly doesn’t hurt that Riccardo Chailly, a rhythm-and-blues drummer in his youth, has more than a little experience with this composer’s music. In fact, he produced a recording of stylish and rhythmically alert Gershwin with the Cleveland Orchestra in the 1980s. His Catfish Row performance here is as good as they come. Not that they come that often, which is a shame since Gershwin’s suite, despite some awkward construction, is a much richer work than Robert Russell Bennett’s popular Porgy and Bess: A Symphonic Picture.

The soloist in the other works is Italian pianist Stefano Bollani. Classically trained, but famed as an exponent of crossover, free, and tango-fusion jazz, he has been racking up awards and getting onto a lot of top-performers lists. Assumedly this, and his popular success with Gershwin’s music, is what led Decca to release another Rhapsody and concerto CD just a year after the plush, sophisticated, and rather staid Alsop/Thibaudet. Happily, the label made better choices this time, and the performances are first-class. As in the previous release, the original Grofé jazz band version of the Rhapsody is used, but this time Decca has recorded Gershwin’s own version of the Piano Concerto in F. Chailly and Bollani play the concerto with full regard for Gershwin’s serious intent, yet with swing and dashing style. They emphasize its modernist tendencies—Chailly suggests a stylistic kinship with Stravinsky in the liner interview—with transparent textures and generally urgent tempos, avoiding the common mistake of treating it like a romantic concerto. Not that Bollani shies away from a big statement and imposing energy, but he is just as likely to employ a light touch and a loose-limbed charm, notably in the bluesy central movement.

The only bad news—and it may not be so for everyone—is the solo improvisation in the Rhapsody . Bollani justifies it, again in the interview, by arguing precedent: Gershwin improvised for the 1924 premiere, so it’s OK. I don’t buy it; Gershwin improvised at Aeolian Hall because he couldn’t finish the work in time. However, he wrote out the solo completely for publication, and except for recording-dictated cuts, performed it as written thereafter. Bollani makes rhythmic alterations throughout, a number of chord enhancements in the solo statements, and adds a set of variations in the final solo section. He takes fewer liberties here than he took a few months later in Rome with James Conlon, in a broadcast video that can be viewed on YouTube, but I would have much preferred it as written.

The disc ends with an orchestral arrangement of Gershwin’s first published work, Rialto Ripples , which is also heavily improvised. Fair enough; it is an encore, and an arrangement, and a novelty work at that. The performers obviously are having a lot of fun. So did I. The sound is first-rate: immediate, detailed, with a wide dynamic range, solid bass, a nice bloom around the soloist and orchestra, and no discernable audience noise. Purist complaints aside, this is one of the most enjoyable Gershwin discs of my acquaintance, joining the Wild/Fiedler/Boston Pops on RCA for the concerto and Mayorga/Richman/Harmonie Ensemble on Harmonia Mundi for the Rhapsody on my best-of list. I can’t imagine any collector who enjoys Gershwin passing it up.

ArkivMusic - The Source for Classical Music!
 

 L y r i c s


Currently no Lyrics available!

 M P 3   S a m p l e s


Currently no Samples available!