Concerto in F

One of the hallmarks of greatness in any field must certainly be a continual urge to push outside of one’s comfort zone. Our most celebrated artists, athletes, and scientists seem to constantly keep exploring, risking failure and damage to their reputations by trying new and unfamiliar things. Benjamin Franklin did not need to stand outside with a kite and key; Jonas Salk could have been successful without spending the better part of a decade searching for a polio vaccine; Michael Jordan did not have to try his hand at baseball; and George Gershwin certainly did not need to write a piano concerto. By 1924, when Walter Damrosch approached Gershwin about writing a “classical concerto” for piano and orchestra, Gershwin was already a household name in the popular music realm, having enjoyed tremendous success with his 1919 song “Swanee” and “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise” in 1920. Lady Be Good, which would become George and brother Ira’s first major Broadway success, was already in production. Gershwin had just premiered his Rhapsody in Blue with bandleader Paul Whiteman at a concert called “An Experiment in Modern Music,” but the orchestration for that work had been done by classical composer Ferde Grofé. Although it meant taking a professional risk, Gershwin was determined to complete this new concerto on his own. He wrote: “Many persons had thought that the Rhapsody was only a happy accident. Well I went out, for one thing, to show them that there was more where that had come from. I made up my mind to do a piece of absolute music. The Rhapsody was a blues impression. The Concerto would be unrelated to any program.”

Composed in a secluded “practice shack” at the Chautauqua Institution during the summer of 1925, Gershwin completed his “New York Concerto,” as he initially called it, without assistance, and the work was premiered in Carnegie Hall on December 3, 1925. The piece was well received by the public but largely dismissed by the New York critics as unworthy of serious attention. Olin Downes of The New York Times called the concerto “a dubious experiment” and noted that Gershwin had “neither the instinct nor the technical equipment to be at ease in … a work of symphonic dimensions.” But Samuel Chotzinoff of NBC understood that the work represented an important melding of classical tradition and popular culture. He wrote: “But all [Gershwin’s] shortcomings are nothing in the face of the one thing he alone, of all those writing the music of today, possesses. He alone actually expresses us … He writes without the smallest hint of self-consciousness, and with unabashed delight in the stridency, the gaucheries, the joy and excitement of life as it is lived right here and now.”

The work, infused with the rhythms and harmonies of jazz, is in the classical three-movement format. The first movement, Allegro, opens noisily with percussion giving way to the main theme based on a Charleston rhythm, which Gershwin said represented “the young, enthusiastic spirit of American life.” The movement alternates between episodes of high-energy jazz and more delicate, improvisatory interludes for the soloist. The second movement is firmly rooted in the blues tradition, opening with a lengthy, dark, and smoky solo for the trumpet, full of as much longing and pathos as any nightclub standard. The soloist offers an upbeat interlude, as if we’ve left the club and headed out onto the street for a bit, only to eventually return to the melancholy mood of the opening music and a nostalgic conclusion. The final Allegro agitato bristles with the urban energy that pervades so much of Gershwin’s orchestral music. Based loosely on the stride piano style of the ragtime era, Gershwin called the movement “an orgy of rhythms.” Energetic, virtuosic writing for both soloist and orchestra builds to a triumphant conclusion, providing a truly grand finale to a work that marked a major victory not only for its composer but for music lovers everywhere.