HKPO's Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue under David Alan Miller

Got slightly soaked for Gershwin last Saturday evening. For no reason, there was a sudden downpour when I emerged from the I-Square exit of the Tsimshatsui MTR Station, where I got stuck with a group of garrulous Italianos and Italianas just returned from Beijing and about to leave for the Expo in Shanghai. They were discussing where to go for dinner and were worried if the normal 8 p.m laser show at the harbour front would still take place. I told them that they better pray to God that the rain would stop soon. I told the couple standing beside me that if they did so,  I'd certainly become an unintended beneficiary and they would have done their good deed for the day as I too needed to hurry to more or less the same location where they were headed. But apparently, they did not pray hard enough or didn't at all.  So I got to continue to engage them in conversation as the minutes ticked away until  I saw 7.50 p.m. appearing on the tiny screen of my handphone. I had to rush out, rain or no rain. With tens of skilful manoeuvres between dripping eaves or canopies of various buildings and a mad sprint through the pedestrian crossing outside of Star House, I was finally within the comforting protection of the Cultural Centre lobby! I breathed a sigh of relief to the sound of the last of the three-minute reminder bell for the start of the concert. 

 

The concert started whilst I was still busy wiping off the rain from my shirt, my face and what little is left of my hair! But it was worth all that nuisance! It was an all Gerswhin programme that evening. We had in the order of play : Oh Kay! Overture (orchestra alone), and My Man's Gone Now, The Man I love, They Can't Take that from me from Porgy and Bess sung by Indra Thomas, soprano and then Rhapsody in Blue played by the famous jazz pianist Kevin Cole for the first half of the evening. For the second half, we had Love is Here to Stay also played by Cole, Embraceable you, "It's wonderful by Cole and finally An American in Paris by the entire orchestra. 

 

There are not that many classicial American composers whose work I like. Charles Ives is now rarely played. Aron Copland does not fare much better. Apart from many fine composers for film music,  George Gershwin has simply got to be my favourite. He is a nervous genius, always afraid that he is not good enough and always asking various more established contemporary composers like Arnold Schoenberg, Maurice Ravel etc to give him lessons in compositions. According to our guest conductor of the evening David Alan Miller, a short stocky American conductor full of enthusiasm for life and music, when Gershwin asked his long time tennis partner Schoenberg for lessons, the latter asked him how much he made a year and after the latter learned what it was, he told Gershswin that he ought to take lesson from Gershwin! And when he asked Ravel for lessons, Ravel told him, "Why would you like to be a second-rate Ravel when you can be a first rate Gershwin"!". So that tells us how good in orchestration and composition he already was. 

 

Gershwin's style is a little difficult to describe. He does not compose in the traditional classical style. Yet that is not entirely true either .  He does have main motifs which are developed and then repeated by various sections of the orchestra and he does have climaxes and refrains too. This however would give us a point of entry. Just like the work song tradition in jazz, he does have a certain call-response pattern in which a leader states or sings a certain key line to which the chorus singers respond. This tradition later developed in instrumental jazz in which at each moment, a certain instrument would be given the entire floor for his cadenza in which the soloist pours out his soul by doing all kinds of variation upon certain component notes of the relevant chords which form the backbone of the piece. To a certain extent, Gershwin does that too in his orchestral pieces. But in addition, he also adds the blues element which has its own tradition of the singer trailing out his voice which rises and then falls to a particular kind of 4/4 rhythm with emphasis on the first note which then trails off in trembling or wavering melancholic tones which in turn may be traced to the Spanish Flamenco jondo tradition. To me, there is that in Gershwin's music too. The role of the "leader" in Gershwin's music is usually given to the trumpets or trombones or some other wind instrument whilst the strings would play the role of the chorus or the response.  This is to me, the specific "jazzy" element which distinguishes his composition from those of any other composers. And the "weepy" blue notes which suddenly fall in volume or energy is also usually given to the brass because the brass was the very first and most important element in early New Orleans jazz. Of course, how can jazz be jazz without jazzy rhythms? And how can there be rhythms without drums. And Gershwin does use a lot of drums: the snare drums, the tom toms (high and low), the timpanis assisted by the tuba in particular passages which give it its peculiar jazzy "feel". And in the piece An American in Paris, which must count as Gershwin masterpiece, he does make use of some form of "dissonance" which characterizes the so-called "modern" compositional methods initiated by Schoenberg. This is a piece which he composed whilst he was staying in the Paris of the late 1920's  which was then really the very seismic centre of the waves of modernist music and modernist art like Dadaism, stream of consciousness novels, imagist poetry etc. during which time he was fascinated by its sights and sounds. And he attempted to capture its bustling, lively, colourful, and zesty city life as well as the cacophony of the Parisian taxi horns with episodes of nostalgia for America. To reflect the peculiar city sound of Paris, he actually bought a number of Parisian taxi horns of various sizes and pitches in the shape of small flare-mouth contraptions with a rubber balloon at their rear which one would have to squeeze with one's hands to produce that very special loud but not shrill sound of the horns and brought them back to New York and which he actually used in his composition. His nostalgia for America appeared in the sound of the blues theme.

 

The various songs in Porgy and Bess were sung by Indra Thomas, a huge black woman who appeared in an evening gown with a shiny greenish gray shawl over her shoulders and a huge glittering necklace band around her neck.  She has a very powerful voice which turns slightly metallic at the highest notes at maximum volume and of course, as a black woman, her voice was eminently suited to jazz type singing which requires the singer to be able to sing at maximum volume then modulates on the same note to suddenly but smoothly drop in volume as the sadness or melancholy of situation portrayed in the song hits her heart. She got thunderous applauses for her rendition of Gershwin's songs . She fully deserves them. I cannot imagine any female singer ( Chinese or European)  in Hong Kong being able to do what she did. And how could I not mention that inimitable and simply charming Kevin Cole, a tall man with round head, round face, round body and chubby hands who would romp on to the stage in small broken steps as if he were walking on thin ice which may break any moment but whose fingers would fly on the keyboard faster than a bullet train. He reminds me of the speed of play of Thelonius Monk or an Oscar Petersen . And he gave a simply fantastic display of his keyboard skill. Miller introduced him as "the" best Gershwin pianist alive today. And he did not lie. His fingers simply flew on the keyboard producing strings of continuous notes with occasional strikes upon certain notes at huge volume to emphasize the rhythm which is characteristic of the jazz style piano playing.  And he played with swing! He played so well that the audience simply would not let him off without an encore. And he very graciously obliged. It was a wonderful evening of all Gershwin music. I do not think that Miller was exaggerating when he told us that he found the HKPO an extremely versatile and malleable orchestra. I love the HKPO! It was an extremely tiring day for me. But as I said, it was worth all the mad rushing and the soak!