Mervyn Cooke
Writer and academic
‘Exploring Gershwin’s Piano Concerto is a great introduction to the exciting creative tensions in American music in the 1920s: jazz and Romanticism fused in a heady mix that was highly provocative for its time.’
– no doubt because the work had been far too eagerly anticipated.
In fact, Gershwin’s concerto had turned out to be not quite as jazzy as might have been expected. With his ambition to be taken seriously as a concert composer, the famous Broadway and Tin Pan Alley tunesmith had turned for inspiration as much to the Romantic tradition as to the popular music of the age: the concerto’s style is in places close to Rachmaninov’s, and embodies some clear gestures towards French impressionism. (Gershwin met Ravel in New York in 1928 and wanted to take composition lessons with him. Ravel famously refused, saying ‘Why be a second-rate Ravel when you can be a first-rate Gershwin?’ According to another report, when Ravel learnt how much Gershwin earned from his commercial composing, the French composer simply told him ‘You teach me!’)
An instructive comparison can perhaps be made with Aaron Copland’s jazzinfluenced Piano Concerto, premiered in Boston in January 1927 and (inaccurately) thought by some to have been directly inspired by Gershwin’s piece. Fired by nationalist fervour, Copland espoused jazz elements in a provocatively modernist way that was a world apart from the rosy glow of Gershwin’s heart-on-sleeve romanticism. Copland’s concerto was roundly panned by the critics (‘a harrowing horror from beginning to end’, wrote one of them), and after the music was booed by orchestral players during rehearsals for a performance at the ★ollywood Bowl in 1928, Copland promptly dropped his own symphonicjazz style like a hot potato.
By contrast, the milder and more lyrical response to the challenge of uniting popular and classical idioms represented by Gershwin’s concerto gradually allowed it to grow in both stature and durability. Even at the time of its first performance, the critic Samuel Chotzinoff – while admitting that Gershwin was not gifted in matters of musical structure and that he was ‘audaciously irresponsible and writes down, apparently, whatever he feels, indiscriminately’ – nevertheless admired the composer’s unique ability to suggest an ‘unabashed delight in the stridency, the gaucheries, the joy and excitement of life as it is lived right here and now.’