All American Celebration

A rhapsody that broke down the wall. For as long as there had been a concert hall and a dance hall, the two had kept their distance — “serious” music on one side, jazz and popular song on the other. On February 12, 1924, George Gershwin tore the wall down. Rhapsody in Blue opens not with a stately chord but with a clarinet that wails upward in a single impudent glissando — the sound of jazz strutting into the concert hall — and for the next sixteen minutes it refuses to choose between the two worlds, fusing blues, ragtime, and the romance of the grand concerto into something nobody yet had a name for. That the Cape Ann Symphony programs it is a small act of the same boundary-crossing: it is the piece that proved American vernacular music could fill a concert hall.

Where Gershwin was in his life. Gershwin was 25 and already famous — but, as far as he was concerned, for the wrong thing. He was a Tin Pan Alley song-plugger turned hit songwriter, the man behind “Swanee,” and he ached to be taken seriously as a composer of concert music. The chance came almost by accident: the bandleader Paul Whiteman announced a concert featuring a new Gershwin work — and Gershwin reportedly learned he was writing one by reading about it in the newspaper. He had about three weeks. He sketched it at the piano, handed the two-piano score to Whiteman’s arranger Ferde Grofé to orchestrate for the band, and at the premiere played the solo part himself, leaving a few passages blank to improvise on the night. There’s a happy symmetry to that on tonight’s program: Ferde Grofé — the arranger who turned Gershwin’s sketch into the Rhapsody we know — appears here as a composer in his own right, with his Grand Canyon Suite.

The reception. The concert — billed, grandly, as “An Experiment in Modern Music” — was long, and the Aeolian Hall audience had grown restless by the time the Rhapsody arrived near the end. Then the clarinet wailed, and the room sat up. Rachmaninoff, Stokowski, Heifetz, Kreisler, and John Philip Sousa were among the listeners; whatever the critics would say about its loose form, the audience was won over by the time the great sweeping love theme poured out, and they cheered. Gershwin walked out of Aeolian Hall a “serious” composer, and Rhapsody in Blue became, almost overnight, the most famous piece of American concert music ever written.

The themes. The Rhapsody is a portrait of a city and a country. The opening clarinet glissando — written by Gershwin as a straight run and turned into that swooping wail by his clarinetist Ross Gorman in rehearsal, a happy accident Gershwin loved and kept — sets the tone: brash, modern, unmistakably urban. From there it tumbles through jazzy, syncopated tunes and a churning, train-like energy before opening into the soaring romantic melody everyone knows. Gershwin called it “a musical kaleidoscope of America — of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness.” The title was his brother Ira’s idea, borrowed from the color-titled paintings of Whistler: not blue the mood, but blue the note.

Famous recordings — and why. A few have become touchstones. Gershwin himself recorded it with Paul Whiteman’s band in 1924, in the lean, brassy original jazz-band scoring — the closest thing to hearing the premiere. Leonard Bernstein, conducting from the keyboard with the Columbia Symphony (1959), gives the definitive big-orchestra American reading, swaggering and tender by turns. Earl Wild’s 1942 recording with Toscanini and the NBC Symphony is all dazzling virtuosity. Oscar Levant — Gershwin’s friend and most devoted champion — plays it with first-hand authority. And Michael Tilson Thomas’s 1976 account restores Grofé’s original jazz-band orchestration and pairs it with Gershwin’s own playing, captured from a 1925 piano roll. Use the listening guide below to hear each.