559705 bk Gershwin US_559705 bk Gershwin US 24/11/2011 12:26 Page 5 Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra JoAnn Falletta AMERICAN CLASSICS The Buffalo Philharmonic JoAnn Falletta serves as Music Director of the Buffalo Orchestra was founded in Philharmonic Orchestra and Virginia Symphony in the 1935 and makes its home United States and Principal Conductor of the Ulster in Kleinhans Music Hall, a Orchestra in Northern Ireland. She has guest conducted National Historic Landmark over a hundred orchestras in North America, and many of with an international the most prominent orchestras in Europe, Asia, South reputation as one of the America and Africa and is the Principal Guest Conductor of GERSHWIN greatest concert halls in the Brevard Music Center of North Carolina. Recipient of the the United States. Through Seaver/National Endowment for the Arts Conductors Award, the decades the orchestra winner of the Stokowski Competition, and the Toscanini, has grown in stature under Ditson and Bruno Walter conducting awards, Falletta has a number of distinguished also received eleven ASCAP awards and serves on the Concerto in F conductors including U.S. National Council on the Arts. A champion of American William Steinberg, Josef music, she has presented nearly five hundred works by Krips, Lukas Foss, Michael American composers including over one hundred world Rhapsody No. 2 Tilson Thomas, Julius premières. Her Naxos recordings include the double Rudel, Semyon Bychkov, GRAMMY® Award winning disc of works by John Corigliano and Maximiano Valdés. and GRAMMY® nominated discs of works of Tyberg, As Buffalo’s cultural Dohnányi, Fuchs, Schubert, and Respighi. I Got Rhythm ambassador, the BPO has For more information, please visit www.joannfalletta.com performed across the Variations Photo: Enid Bloch Photography United States, Canada and Europe, including concerts at Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, Boston’s Symphony Hall, San Francisco’s Davies Hall and 22 appearances in Carnegie Hall. The orchestra’s European tour included two sold-out performances in Vienna’s Musikverein, and concerts in Milan, Geneva, Zurich and Frankfurt, among other venues. The BPO performs 120 concerts annually and is heard by millions on radio broadcasts across the United States and beyond on American Public Media’s Performance Today. For more information, please visit www.bpo.org Orion Weiss, Piano Photo: Mark Dellas Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra JoAnn Falletta 8.559705 5 6 8.559705 559705 bk Gershwin US_559705 bk Gershwin US 24/11/2011 12:26 Page 2 George Gershwin (1898-1937) Rhapsody No. 2 for Piano and Orchestra Arizona, where he falls in love with a small town post Orion Weiss mistress. Like a modern TV comedy, the stage scenes Concerto in F • Rhapsody No. 2 • I Got Rhythm Variations In 1931, barely four years after movies began to talk and were chock full of droll confusions, leading to a happy From the universe of twentieth-century music, the names George was well aware of those perceptions. He noted: sing (The Jazz Singer with Al Jolsen), Gershwin was ending. Other well-known songs from the musical include of three Americans are iconic: Aaron Copland, Leonard “Many persons had thought that the Rhapsody was engaged by Fox Studios to provide a six-minute interlude Embraceable You and But Not for Me. Bernstein and George Gershwin. While their individual only a happy accident. Well, I wanted to show that there for a new film titled Delicious, starring Janet Gaynor and During a recorded radio broadcast after the tour, styles differed widely, all three held reverence for was plenty more where that had come from. I made up Charles Farrell. The intended scene was a city-scape Gershwin remarked (with his Brooklyn syntax intact): European traditions in serious music, all three were my mind to do a piece of ‘absolute’ music. The showing the hustle-bustle of Manhattan under “Good evening. This is George Gershwin speaking. outstanding pianists, and all three were devoted to Rhapsody, as its title implied, was a blues impression. construction. While scoring the music, Gershwin decided The orchestra just played my song Mine. And now I’m American motifs, with an eye and ear on popular forms. The Concerto would be unrelated to any program. And to let inspiration lead the way, expanding the effort into a going to play you my latest composition which I wrote a For his part, Gershwin loved Bach, adored Chopin, that is exactly how I wrote it. I learned a great deal from new, full-voiced work for piano and orchestra. We are few months ago down in Palm Beach, Florida. This is a could not get enough of Debussy and was a big fan of the that experience, particularly in the handling of amused to learn the composer had more trouble naming composition in a form of variations on a tune, and the music of his tennis partner Arnold Schoenberg. And of instruments in combination. the piece than composing it. The particular movie tune is I Got Rhythm. this American trio, it was Gershwin who was truly the lead “The first movement of the Concerto in F is quick and sequence captured a few frames of rivets as they were “I think you might be interested to hear about a few of bird, exerting a formative influence on Bernstein and pulsating, representing the young, enthusiastic spirit of tossed and hammered to join the steel girders. On that the variations we are going to play. After an introduction Copland. The point is made to correct early critics who American life with a Charleston motif. Later, a second cue, Gershwin wrote a coy and accented ‘rivet theme’ by the orchestra the piano plays a theme rather simply. claimed that dear George was merely a clever Broadway theme is introduced by the piano. The second movement heard at once in the opening bars. With this in mind he The first variation is a very complicated rhythmic pattern song writer who managed to ‘moonlight’ as a composer has a poetic nocturnal atmosphere which has come to be initially titled the piece “Rhapsody in Rivets,” then played by the piano while the orchestra fits in the tune. for Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris and Cuban referred to as the American blues, but in a purer form changed it to “New York Rhapsody,” then “Manhattan “The next variation is in waltz time, and the third is a Overture. In fact, by his premature passing at age 39, than that in which they are usually treated. The final Rhapsody” before deciding on the current title. Chinese variation in which I imitate Chinese flutes that Gershwin had managed to score just six orchestral titles, movement reverts to the style of the first. It is an orgy of Up-beat and dashing in every measure, the music is play out of tune as they always are. Next the piano plays including the three works presented on this recording. rhythms, starting violently and keeping the same pace conjured from spry fragments of impromptu jazz and a rhythmic variation in which the left hand plays the With sadness we can only ponder the wealth that would throughout.” blues. The assignment for the solo piano is immensely melody upside down, while the right plays it first on the have followed had Gershwin survived to his senior years. Completed in 1925, the Concerto in F begins with challenging, swinging to and fro with the orchestra from theory that we shouldn’t let one hand know what the For reference, it was the easy appeal of Gershwin’s ‘wake-up’ timpani strokes like those which so often brash and sizzle to lush and lovely on the wing. The other is doing. Then comes the finale. Now, after all this music that made critics uneasy. His creations for the opened the curtains in Manhattan’s theater district (in fact Second Rhapsody was given its première on 29th information about Variations on I Got Rhythm, how about Great White Way were replete with lyrics, tunes and Gershwin once thought to title the piece A New York January, 1932 by the Boston Symphony under the baton hearing it.” rhythms that were simply too catchy to be trusted. The Concerto). From that point on we are in for an urbane of Sergey Koussevitzky with Gershwin at the keyboard. Gershwin was keen to scribe his own orchestration same attitude prevailed over his few but brilliant feast of marvelous tunes, sassy tempos and mad-cap for the Variations (the last full score from his desk), instrumental scores, and even his opera Porgy and Bess. colors – teasing and tempting, replete with optimism and I Got Rhythm Variations for Piano and Orchestra penned with one ear on advanced harmony, another on Photo: Leslie van Stelten For example, the Metropolitan Opera waited fifty years nostalgia. The second movement begins with an the rich sonorities of modern theater. The opening before presenting Porgy for the first time in 1985. extended blues reverie, heard in the solo trumpet over a Early in 1934 Gershwin needed a new concert piece for a phrases from the solo clarinet and piano are at first atonal sustained clarinet choir. The entrance of the piano adds a four-week concert tour on which he would be the piano – perhaps a wink towards Schoenberg. In turn, the tune is Pianist Orion Weiss holds a leading position among American musicians of his generation. His impressive list of Concerto in F piquant lilt to the Impressionist tableau, with an intimate soloist with the renowned Leo Reisman Orchestra. The presented as an up-beat arabesque with savvy accents. awards includes the Classical Recording Foundation’s Young Artist of the Year Award, the Gilmore Young Artist soliloquy mid-way.