Levant Plays Gershwin

George Gershwin was not only a genius — he was the epitome of genius: a man who carved his accomplishment out of unfriendly surroundings by the sheer weight and power of his talent. There doesn’t seem to have been one single major factor in his early life that favored making him a fine composer. He could just as easily been anything else, so far as the world was concerned.

So far as George was concerned, too, until he was about ten years old. Before that he had been just another kid off the New York streets. Nobody made him practice. When he showed interest, they started him with lessons, but nobody pushed him. He got that way through pure love of what he heard and later on a huge ambition to do something with it.

The world George Gershwin grew up in presented two important facts to him — one of them was the existence of this music, popular jazz music. The other was the contempt for it on the part of the educated, the cultured, the important people. It reads like an unlikely Hollywood-style version of the motive of his life, but the truth seems to be that George Gershwin conceived and never lost a driving ambition to bring validity and professional recognition to this music.

Naturally, he got an argument from most people, including his piano teacher, Charles Hambitzer. “I have a new pupil,” Hambitzer wrote his sister, “who will make a mark in music if anybody will. The boy is a genius, without a doubt; he’s just crazy about music and can’t wait until it is time to take his lesson . . . He wants to go in for this modern stuff, jazz, and what not. But I’m not going to let him for a while. I’ll see that he gets a firm foundation in the standard music first.”

Actually, Gershwin’s firm foundation is in two tremendous cultural cornerstones. One is the traditional Jewish melodic and harmonic musical expression; the other is the Negro rhythmic feeling. Put the two together, even idly on the piano — play a Jewish folk tune and put jazz syncopation under it — and you have something very close to the harmonic vocabulary of George Gershwin. It is tempered by other elements, of course, including the main trend of American popular music and the American popular song and show tune as developed by Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths including Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern, two of Gershwin’s foremost advocates.

February 12, 1924, the date of Paul Whiteman’s Aeolian Hall jazz concert, marks the change from Broadway song writer to musician with a serious purpose. A year earlier Gershwin’s one-act opera, “135th Street,” was given one performance in the “Scandals of 1922.” Recently it was revived on television, and the difference in the quality of work between this morbid, amateurish little opera and Gershwin’s later work is hard to believe. But the story of Gershwin’s short life is the story of such fantastic periods of growth. The Rhapsody in Blue, written in an incredibly short time, even though orchestrated for Gershwin by Ferde Grofé, is the work of a composer of delicacy and confidence.

About it, Gershwin himself wrote: “There had been so much talk about the limitations of jazz . . . Jazz, they said, had to be in strict time. It had to cling to dance rhythms. I resolved, if possible, to kill that misconception . . . I had no set plan, no structure. The Rhapsody, you see, began as a purpose, not a plan. I worked out a few themes, but just at this time I had to appear in Boston for the premiere of ‘Sweet Little Devil.’ It was on the train, with its steely rhythms, its rattly-bang . . . (I frequently hear music in the very heart of noise), that I suddenly heard — even saw on paper — the complete construction of the Rhapsody from beginning to end. No new themes came to me, but I worked on the thematic material already in my mind, and tried to conceive the composition as a whole . . . By the time I reached Boston, I had the definite plot of the piece, as distinguished from its actual substance.”

Between the Rhapsody, for which much of the credit really belonged to Grofé and the improvisations of Whiteman’s players, and the Concerto in F, in 1925, came another period of tremendous growth. In under two years Gershwin made the journey from the barest professional aptitude to writing and scoring what Sigmund Spaeth frankly calls the most important of all American compositions in the field of absolute music.

The opening theme of the Concerto is certainly one of the most passionate and inspired pieces of composition in existence. It dominates the whole piece, and there is no other music that is quite like it.

For the rest, Gershwin has put forth one sweet melodic tune after another — spritely, gay, “swingy,” lilting or sad — they speak to us in such familiar language yet so movingly we toss aside the critics’ yelp that such abundance of thematic material was bad composition. It may be bad composition, but it is, in its way, great art.

The piano is used percussively a great deal, and always with good effect. This was Gershwin’s instrument, and he spoke its language like he’d invented it. The piano holds the composition together, it has such presence and authority, and more so in this music than in any other Gershwin we hear, through the piano, the composer’s own great, driving energy.

In 1928 Gershwin went to Paris in search of more thorough training. Before he even landed on the continent he had in mind the idea for An American in Paris. He wrote in an interview: “The opening part will be developed in typical French style, in the manner of Debussy and the Six, though the themes are all original. My purpose here is to portray the impressions of an American visitor in Paris as he strolls about the city, listens to the various street noises, and absorbs the French atmosphere.”

It is often lonely music, homesick ‘blues.’ A lot of all Gershwin’s music is terribly sad, and this combination of sadness and vitality is another of his hallmarks. They were in him in greater abundance, apparently, than in his successors. No one has been able to continue where Gershwin stopped. Composers with all the training in the world cannot do what he did, proving that the best instruction in an art is to be born very gifted.

He was severely critical of himself and never gave up trying to remedy the faults and shortcomings of his craft. With fame and fortune already in his pocket he went back and began to study harmony all over again, also theory with Schillinger and counterpoint with Henry Cowell.

He was a simple person, without interest in vices, happiest when he was hard at work. He was not only the greatest composer we have had, but the most truly American.

Notes by CHARLES BURR

FACTS ABOUT THIS RECORD: George Gershwin born in Brooklyn, New York, September 26, 1898; died in Hollywood, California, July 11, 1937.

Rhapsody in Blue composed by Gershwin for Paul Whiteman’s famous concert of jazz music at Aeolian Hall, New York City, February 12, 1924. Orchestrated by Ferde Grofé.

An American in Paris composed in Paris, in 1928, first performed with the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra in 1928, under Walter Damrosch.

Concerto in F composed on commission from the Symphony Society of New York and Walter Damrosch, and introduced, with the composer at the piano, in 1925. Movements are: (1) Allegro (2) Andante con moto (3) Allegro con brio.

More Music — twice as much as before — is on this Columbia “Lp”. Where Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and American in Paris alone took a complete old-style “Lp”, they are here coupled with the Concerto in F. By Columbia’s superior grooving method a saving of fifty percent in purchase costs and storage space is effected for the buyer — an additional development in the miracle of modern long-playing recording.

– Notes by CHARLES BURR

Track Listing

1. Rhapsody in Blue Oscar Levant — Piano; Eugene Ormandy — Conductor; The Philadelphia Orchestra
2. An American in Paris Artur Rodzinski — Conductor; Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York
3. Concerto in F for Piano and Orchestra Oscar Levant — Piano; Andre Kostelanetz — Conductor; Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York

Album Information

• Artist: Oscar Levant
• Catalog Number: CL 700
• Catalog Numbers: CL 700
• Label: Columbia
• Liner Notes: Notes by CHARLES BURR
• Source: CL-700
• Format: LP, High Fidelity Recording
• Photograph: Hal Reif Needle Advisory:

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