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Second Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra |
Composed: 1931 Estimated length: |
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Born on September 26, 1898, in Brooklyn, New York; Died on July 11, 1937, in Hollywood, California. |
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First performance: January 29, 1932, with the composer as the soloist and Serge Koussevitzky leading the Boston Symphony Orchestra. |
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First Nashville Symphony performance: December 3, 2004, with Kenneth Schermerhorn conducting and pianist Stewart Goodyear at Andrew Jackson Hall. |
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Last month marked the official 100th anniversary of the world premiere of Rhapsody in Blue. Its immediate impact gave George Gershwin a huge career boost. Even more, his achievement in bridging musical worlds that had been kept separate remains as inspiring as it did a century ago—and has been followed by countless artists since then. Gershwin’s experiments worked in two directions: he opened up a new vista for American classical music by inviting the spirit and language of jazz into the concert hall; at the same time, his efforts inspired approaches to jazz that defied the standardized commercial limitations of the music industry. It should be pointed out that Black American composers like James P. Johnson—and, a bit later, Duke Ellington—were conducting trailblazing experiments of their own in this regard.
Second Rhapsody is a product of Gershwin’s first stay in Hollywood, where he and his brother Ira spent time in late 1930-early 1931 writing music for the film Delicious, which starred Janet Gaynor as a Scottish newcomer to New York City. (A plot twist involves her being betrayed by her romantic rival, who reports her as an illegal immigrant.) For a key sequence in the film, Gershwin composed an elaborate piece for piano and orchestra that at first went by several working titles: Manhattan Rhapsody, New York Rhapsody, and Rhapsody in Rivets.
The studio mercilessly cut the piece to half its length, but when he was back home in New York, Gershwin salvaged his efforts by preparing a separate concert work, which became known as Second Rhapsody. In the years since Rhapsody in Blue (which was orchestrated by a colleague), Gershwin had significantly honed his understanding of compositional technique and how to use the orchestra, and he regarded the new, harmonically more adventurous piece as “in many respects, such as orchestration and form, it is the best thing I have written.”
WHAT TO LISTEN FOR
The piano opens with a solo, beginning with an insistently percussive series of notes in the bass. The orchestra soon enters with march-like material, and a solo trumpet pronounces a compact, blues-tinged theme (it shares a percussive theme) meant in the film to conjure the image of the city under construction—hence the passing title Rhapsody in Rivets. Biographer Howard Pollack points out Gershwin’s use of syncopation here “lends the music a Latin quality” that “reflects the changing face of New York itself” in the interim since Rhapsody in Blue. A contrasting slower central section features a lush melody many aficionados regard as among the most beautiful ever penned by Gershwin. The opening music of rivets and urban landscapes returns, while teasing allusions to Rhapsody in Blue itself close the piece.
In addition to solo piano, scored for 3 flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings
− Thomas May is the Nashville Symphony's program annotator.
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