Now that the centenary of Rhapsody in Blue (last Monday) has come and gone – with fanfare and a degree of controversy and a sampling of many renditions of Gershwin’s “worst masterpiece” – I am left with a craving to revisit my favorite version: by Alexander Tsfasman and Gennadi Rozhdestvensky. That’s right: a 1960s Soviet studio recording with a Moscow orchestra.
Rozhdestvensky was the leading Russian symphonic conductor of his generation. Tsfasman was the Russian pianist most associated with Rhapsody in Blue, having toured it throughout the Soviet Union during the interwar decades.
I would call this recording a supreme validation of Gershwin – from abroad (of course), where he was not patronized.
A product of the Moscow Conservatory, Tsfasman (though closely associated with jazz throughout his career) brings to Gershwin’s piano writing a Romantic keyboard arsenal – hair-trigger virtuosity; an heroic range of sonority and dynamics – rarely encountered in this much battered score. Initially denigrated by Lawrence Gilman in the New York Herald-Tribune for its “trite and feeble” tunes, the Rhapsody was later described by Leonard Bernstein as “not a composition at all.” Most recently, in the New York Times, it was pegged the “worst masterpiece,” “corny and naïve.”
If you care to sample Tsfasman’s Gershwin bear-hug, start with the solo at 8:30 and go to the “love theme,” magnificently prepared and sung, and thence to the end.
Another validation, again from abroad, is last Monday’s 45-minute feature on BBC 3: a tenacious inquiry, by Olivia Giovetti and Nick Taylor, into the American “melting pot”: what it was – and was not — for Gershwin; whether something like it can be captured in music today. The participants are mainly American composers, who volunteer a range of considered responses, including some misgivings.
I contribute my own two cents — and now find I have this to add: Gershwin’s pot included Black American music, Cuban music, Jewish music, classical music. He loved it all and didn’t worry about disrespecting anyone. In today’s terms, he was a heedless appropriator. But his curiosity was so great, and his gift so facile, that he could absorb these influences without skimming.
Today the range of influences is much greater — for a start: Asian and African music (as Steve Reich mentions on the BBC show). This may be viewed as an enrichment, but it’s also a risky complication. We have one master practitioner of East/West fusion who’s deeply versed in a wide-ranging multiplicity of styles — that’s Lou Harrison. A lot of what’s produced by American composers today, reflecting on the American experience, seems to me in comparison “makeshift music”: a shortcut. Will any of it last?
Gershwin, as he rapidly matured, became a student of musical form — in some respects, the hallmark of Western classical music: organizing time. For instance: considering that Porgy and Bess was Gershwin’s first attempt at something like grand opera, the scene of Robbins’ funeral is a magnificently knit narrative sequence (which cannot be said of the opera as a whole — Gershwin was still learning). What American composers are today aspiring toward a comparable mastery of long-range musical argument? I worry about this sort of thing. And even more (of course) about the state of the American “melting pot” generally.
The question overhanging BBC-3’s splendid tribute to Rhapsody in Blue is: Where are we now?
Indeed.
Oscar Levant — I think it was in his first book, A Smattering of Ignorance — tells a story of Toscanini rehearsing Cuban Overture. It may be true or apocryphal but I hope it’s true.
In the rehearsal something the large percussion section was doing had Toscanini upset, so he stopped the orchestra and started to lecture the percussionists. “You have to play like Cubans!” he yelled in his distinct and heavy Italian accent. At this, one of the percussionists said back in a heavy German accent: “But Maestro, vee is all Ameddicuns!”
I’m 78, classically trained, and grew up with Oscar Levant’s version of the Rhapsody (and all of Gershwin’s piano works, actually), so I’ll always prefer his version, a product of the mid-1940s with a Jewish kid from Pittsburgh working with Ormandy, a Jewish guy from Hungary and a Philly Orchestra full of musicians of God-knows how many nationalities. It’s one of maybe ten versions I keep and like, but of them all, this one works for me.
Joe, do you know this?