Most people tend to know George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” by way of the 1942 score of an arrangement by Ferde Grofé for full symphony orchestra. However, the music was first performed by Paul Whiteman leading his Palais Royal Orchestra (a rather fancy name for a jazz band) on February 12, 1924. It was the penultimate offering in a program entitled An Experiment in Modern Music, conceived, in part, as a platform for bringing jazz into the concert hall. Since Gershwin was inexperienced in orchestration, this “original version” also had instrumentation by Grofé.
Whitman’s ensemble had only 23 musicians, several playing multiple instruments. It is worth quoting the Wikipedia page that enumerates who played what in Grofé’s orchestration:
For the reeds section, Ross Gorman (Reed I) played an oboe, a heckelphone, a clarinet in B♭, sopranino saxophones in E♭ & B♭, an alto saxophone, one E♭ soprano clarinet, and alto and bass clarinets; Donald Clark (Reed II) played a soprano saxophone in B♭, alto and baritone saxophones, and Hale Byers (Reed III) played soprano saxophone in B♭, tenor saxophone, baritone saxophone, and a flute.
For the brass section, two trumpets in B♭ were played by Henry Busse and Frank Siegrist; two French horns in F played by Arturo Cerino and Al Corrado; two trombones played by Roy Maxon and James Casseday, and a tuba played by Guss Helleburg.
Albert Armer played a double bass.
The percussion section included a drum set, timpani, and a glockenspiel played by George Marsh; one piano typically played by either Ferde Grofé or Henry Lange; one tenor banjo played by Michael Pingatore, and a complement of violins.
For those that have been counting, the size of that “complement” was ten!
Conductor Edwin Outwater (photograph by David J. Kim, courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony)
Last night this “historically informed” version of “Rhapsody in Blue” was the featured offering to launch the summer season of the San Francisco Symphony. Edwin Outwater conducted a “holiday appropriate” program, which will be repeated on the Fourth of July to launch the return of the Stern Grove Festival. The piano soloist was Aaron Diehl, who exploited the opportunity to inject his own “historically informed” approach. (I should note that, from my vantage point, it did not appear that all of those wind instruments were covered by only three players.)
Gershwin had not yet written out the piano part at the time of the performance, meaning that there was probably a fair amount of improvising, particularly when the piano was playing without instrumental accompaniment. While the piano part had been fixed in notation by the time Grofé’s 1942 arrangement was published, Diehl was not shy about injecting his own improvisations into his solo passages. His take on those passages was stimulating enough to make any listener jaded by too many United Airlines commercials sit up and take notice.
The remainder of the program offered several “traditional” offerings for the holiday weekend, including excerpts from the music that Aaron Copland composed for Agnes de Mille’s “Rodeo” ballet, a movement from Morton Gould’s second “American Symphonette,” an arrangement of music John Williams had composed for the Olympics, and a rousing account of John Philip Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever” as a conclusion.
However, Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen seems to have made it a point to make sure that the current generation of American composers was not neglected. Thus we had a compellingly intense “Reflection on a Memorial,” composed only for strings by Quinn Mason. This was followed by “The Block” by Carlos Simon, described by the composer as “a short orchestral study based on the late visual art of Romare Bearden.” The title referred to the depiction of a single block in Harlem, but the sharp edges in Bearden’s work seem to have eluded Simon’s musical rhetoric. Perhaps I am still under the influence of Godfather of Harlem, but I found the music more than a little too bouncy for the sources that supposedly inspired it. It was hard to shake a voice at the back of my head nagging, “What would Malcolm say?”
The more “senior” contemporary composer on the program was Jennifer Higdon. “Cathedrals” was the last movement of her suite All Things Majestic, which she had composed for the 50th anniversary of the Grand Teton Music Festival. The music was intended to liken the experience of a national park to one of a vast cathedral. This struck me as a gesture of good intentions, but I was not convinced by the rhetorical techniques that Higdon deployed in her score.
At the end of the evening the real satisfaction came from the reminder that we’ll always have Gershwin!
No comments:
Post a Comment