Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue & Piano Concerto in F - 9565

From the Artist 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 gli
ASIN: B004FPQV9U
VSKU: DBV.B004FPQV9U.G
Condition: Good
Author/Artist:Stefano Bollani|George Gershwin|Gewandhaus Orchestra|Riccardo Chailly
Binding: Audio cd