Gershwin: Concerto in F — Spartanburg Philharmonic

by Chris Vaneman

What Jessie Montgomery may well prove to be in the 2020’s is what George Gershwin definitely was a century before. A child of one of New York’s vibrant working-class neighborhoods (East New York in Brooklyn, in Gershwin’s case), Gershwin stirred elements of America’s popular music into the European Classical tradition to explosive effect, rocketing to near-instant popularity and creating some of America’s most enduring and best-loved music.

The younger son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Gershwin began teaching himself piano around the age of seven, when his parents arranged for an upright instrument to be hoisted into the window of their apartment so that his older brother could study it. His brother, Ira, was of a more literary turn of mind, though, and was relieved when George hogged the instrument so continuously that Ira was permitted to stop his lessons.

By the age of 16 George had dropped out of high school to begin working as a song plugger (a profession that, alas, is no longer one the IRS sees a lot of on tax forms. A song plugger was a young pianist who offered continual live demonstrations of newly-published sheet music for music store patrons; there were so many song pluggers working the music stores on 28th Street that it became known as Tin Pan Alley, because with so many pianos playing popular songs all once, it had the effect to a passerby on the sidewalk of hearing tin pans crashing together.) He sold his first song to a music publisher at 16 – for the sum of 50 cents – had a ragtime hit at 17, and by 20 had written one of the hottest-selling songs in the country. His jazz-classical hybrid Rhapsody in Blue was an immediate success in 1924, and the Concerto in F followed hot on its heels in 1925.

If, as Rachmaninov stated with some asperity but with some truth after its premiere, the Rhapsody in Blue is a series of instrumental pop songs strung together, the Concerto in F displays a very different ambition. Even as he wrote hit after hit in the world of popular song, Gershwin aspired to master the complex, long forms of classical music. He sought out lessons from both Ravel and Stravinsky: both refused, the former asking, “Why become a second-rate Ravel when you’re already a first-rate Gershwin?” and the latter, on hearing what Gershwin had earned in songwriting royalties the previous year, exclaiming, “You should be teaching me!”

The Concerto in F was conceived literally the day after Rhapsody in Blue’s premiere, when Walter Damrosch, director of the New York Symphony (which was to change its name to “Philharmonic” in the following year), called Gershwin to commission a piano concerto in a traditional three-movement form. The composer was already contracted to write three musical comedies, however, and it wasn’t till the following summer that he was able to get to Damrosch’s piece. The Concerto uses the same sort of popular-music materials found in the Rhapsody – pentatonic and Blues scales, dance rhythms from the Charleston and other Jazz dances of the day in the outer movements, a soulful Blues melody at the heart of the middle movement. But it develops and deploys those materials with the approach of a Romantic, and orchestrates with brilliance and panache that prove Ravel and Stravinsky right: he never needed their help after all.