An American Celebration
George Gershwin Leroy Anderson Gershwin- Of Thee I Sing Overture Anderson- Belle of the Ball Blue Tango Gershwin- Embraceable You Anderson- The Syncopated Clock Arietta Piano Concerto in C Major Overture to Goldilocks I Never Know When Gershwin- Love Is Here to Stay Anderson- Jazz Pizzicato Forgotten Dreams The Typewriter Gershwin- Rhapsody in Blue Guest Artist Kevin Cole, piano There are no better words to describe the pianist extraordinaire, Kevin Cole, than through the mouth of Irving Berlin. In a meeting between the two, Irving Berlin had the opportunity to watch Kevin Cole perform some of Gershwin’s pieces. After the private and homely performance, famous song writer and composer Irving Berlin went up to the pianist and said “Kid, if I could have played like that, I never would have become a songwriter.” Cole would later become the foremost and greatest interpreter of George Gershwin’s music, and is the top performer of The Great American Songbook. Kevin Cole’s playing has been described to resemble Gershwin, as though Gershwin were playing. The thing that separates Cole’s performance from other Gershwin pianists is Cole’s ability to feel and interpret the original intention and spirit of Gershwin rather than just notes on a sheet of music. Gershwin was a jazz pianist and improvised on his own works. In fact, Cole had the opportunity to perform for the member’s of Gershwin’s family. As they listened to Cole play, tears of satisfaction rolled down their faces. This is the way Gershwin would have played. Gershwin’s close family and friends are not the only people to recognize Cole’s extraordinary talent. He has sold out auditoriums with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, Chicago Symphony and others. But his American reputation has reached international territory. Cole has even been featured at the first annual George and Ira Gershwin festival as the festival opener. Cole’s passion is not only piano performance, but musical theater. As a Music Director and Archivist, Cole has won a number of awards and has worked with Broadway choreographer Randy Skinner to arrange fantastic new dance numbers for the revival of the show “Babes.” George Gershwin grew up in a crowded Brooklyn apartment with his Russian immigrant parents and three siblings. Not interested in school, he dropped out at age 15 to work for $15 a week as a “song plugger”—a salesman of sorts who played and sang new songs—in a Tin Pan Alley publishing firm. In this role Gershwin quickly achieved remarkable fluency at the keyboard, a feel for the needs of singers, and in commercial songwriting. Before his 21st birthday he was a highly regarded pianist, had several successful popular songs and had even seen the premiere of his own first Broadway show (La Lucille, 1919). From early on, Gershwin was fascinated by the rhythms and vitality of African-American music and dance, which had become part of the homegrown American art form, jazz. This influence was equally strong whether he was writing for Broadway, Hollywood, or the concert hall. For his contemporaries, who were stunned by the composer’s sudden death of a brain tumor at age 38, opening portals between the worlds of pop, jazz, and art music seemed Gershwin’s most important contribution to history. But in our own time, when these boundaries seem less important, it appears that Gershwin’s lasting influence remains the sheer popular appeal of his music. A case in point is the quasi-concerto Rhapsody in Blue. Persuaded by bandleader Paul Whiteman to write a “serious” composition in jazz, Gershwin sought to prove skeptics wrong about the viability of such a piece. He later wrote, "There had been so much talk about the limitations of jazz. Jazz, they said, had to be in strict time. It had to cling to dance rhythms. I resolved, to kill that misconception ... The Rhapsody, you see, began as a purpose, not a plan.” The plan, it is safe to say, worked: Rhapsody has become an emblematic piece of Americana, embodying Jazz Age glitz in a noble and uplifting expression of optimism. Gershwin performed the piano part himself in the 1924 premiere, working from memory since only the band parts were written down. The work was later scored for a more standard orchestra, the version most often heard today. The upwardly sliding clarinet note that opens the piece is a famous vestige of the original; however, Paul Whiteman’s clarinetist had mastered this virtuoso jazz technique long before his “legit” colleagues in symphony orchestras could produce it. His success in concert music did not end Gershwin’s devotion to Broadway, an arena in which he was perfectly matched to the talents of his brother, Ira. The now-standard song Embraceable You was originally written for the unpublished operetta East is West (1928), but did not appear on Broadway until Ginger Rogers sang it in a routine choreographed by Fred Astaire in Girl Crazy (1930). Gershwin’s next musical, Of Thee I Sing (1931), a musical satire about American politics, became the first Broadway musical to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for drama. At the time of its composition, Gershwin and his brother lived in Hollywood. There, Gershwin completed his last musical composition: the score for The Goldwyn Follies (1938). The film, neither a critical nor popular success, nonetheless features one of the most familiar gems of his career, “Love is Here to Stay.” Later it wasn’t used as the main theme for the 1951 classic MGM film An American in Paris. Unlike Gershwin, Leroy Anderson (he pronounced his first name with the emphasis on the second syllable) was an excellent student. Attaining his undergraduate degree magna cum laude from Harvard, and continued towards a PhD in German and Scandinavian languages. As director of the Harvard Band, his arrangements caught the eye of Arthur Fiedler, whose Boston Pops premiered Anderson’s first original work, Jazz Pizzicato, in 1938. Compositional output slowed during the war years, when Anderson’s fluency in Icelandic was seized upon by the US Army. Stationed in Reykjavik in 1942 and later promoted to Captain, Anderson was ultimately assigned to the Pentagon as Chief of the Scandinavian Department of Military Intelligence. Choosing instead a path in music, he declined an offer to become US Attaché to Sweden and moved with his wife and young daughter to New York. The decision may have been prompted in part on the success of The Syncopated Clock, which he conducted while still in service in 1945. Such light orchestral miniatures became Anderson’s hallmark; after 1950 he conducted the premieres of his works in the recording studio for Decca Records. This wildly successful commercial arrangement brought pieces like Belle of the Ball, the gold-record hit Blue Tango, The Typewriter, Forgotten Dreams, and Arietta. Anderson did try his hand at larger forms, however, twice: a Piano Concerto (1953), which he had doubts about and withdrew, but was released posthumously by his estate in 1988; and the musical Goldilocks (1953), written with Walter and Jean Kerr. The song I Never Know When to Say When was one of the numbers in that show. |
Concerts & Events |
