- Person
- George Gershwin
- Lived
- 1898–1937
- Field
- Music
- From
- American
The story
George Gershwin was born in Brooklyn in 1898 to Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. Only a few years before he wrote his concerto, he had been earning 15 dollars a week as a song plugger on New York's Tin Pan Alley, having left school at 15. Then, on 12 February 1924, Rhapsody in Blue made him famous overnight.
The conductor Walter Damrosch was in the audience at that premiere. The very next day he asked Gershwin to write a full-scale piano concerto for the New York Symphony Orchestra, closer in form to a classical concerto than the Rhapsody and, this time, orchestrated by the composer himself. Ferde Grofé had scored the Rhapsody, and Gershwin now set himself the challenge of doing everything alone.
Busy with three Broadway shows, he could not start sketching until May 1925. He wrote the first movement in July, the second in August and the third in September, much of it in a practice shack at the Chautauqua Institution in New York State, where his quarters were declared off limits until four each afternoon. He finished the orchestration on 10 November, then hired a 55-piece orchestra at his own expense to try out the draft, with Damrosch attending and offering advice.
The Concerto in F was premiered at Carnegie Hall on 3 December 1925, with Gershwin as soloist and Damrosch conducting. The concert sold out. The work combines the rhythms and harmonies of jazz and blues, including the Charleston in its first movement and a blues trumpet melody in its second, with the traditional three-movement form of the classical concerto. Some critics felt it owed more to Debussy than to jazz, but the English composer William Walton said he adored its orchestration, and Gershwin kept exploring the meeting point between American popular music and European concert traditions.
The concerto has become an established part of the classical repertoire, performed by orchestras and pianists worldwide. Gershwin played it himself at a special concert of his music with the San Francisco Symphony under Pierre Monteux on 11 February 1937, just months before his death.
Why it matters
The Concerto in F helped win a lasting place for American jazz idioms in the world's concert halls.
About George Gershwin
Composer of "Rhapsody in Blue" and "Porgy and Bess"; bridged jazz and classical, defining American 20th-century music.
More about George Gershwin
- George Gershwin's An American in Paris painted a cityGeorge Gershwin wrote his tone poem An American in Paris in 1928 after a stay in Paris, where Nadia Boulanger and Maurice Ravel declined to teach him for fear of spoiling his style.
- George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess became an American classicGeorge Gershwin's 1935 opera Porgy and Bess, written for a cast of classically trained African American singers, is now staged by opera houses around the world.
- Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue brought jazz to concert hallsWritten in about five weeks, George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue premiered in New York on 12 February 1924 and brought jazz into the concert hall.
Sources
- George Gershwin Wikipedia
- Concerto in F (Gershwin) Wikipedia
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