Gershwin "live" in Hong Kong (歌舒詠 在港的「真人」表演)

George Gershwin must be one of the most dearly beloved American jazz composers of all times. An emigrant from Russia to Brooklyn, he was little exposed to music until his father bought him a second-hand piano when he started to self-teach himself until he's sufficiently good to be hired as a pianist to play the latest releases by a musical publisher at age 15. He was very talented and instead of playing songs by others, soon started writing songs of his own and by 20 had a number of hits in his own name including the song Swanee, made famous by Al Jolson's.


On HKPO's Saturday night concert, we got the chance to hear Gershwin playing his own classic "Rhapsody in Blue". Didn't he die in 1937? Sure he did. But his death hasn't destroyed the "piano roll" he produced. The piano roll is a kind of technique more or less like the tape of the teleprinter machine which preserved the relevant signals which when decoded can reproduce as strikes on the pianola's tensioned strings every note of very song originally played upon it including its nuances, accents, intensity and duration, a process developed by RCA Victor and which resulted in a self-playing "pianola" whose presence in the drawing room no self-respecting "cultured" American family could be dispensed with. Rachmaninoff produced some "piano rolls". So did Gershwin. The HKPO under a young guest American conductor David Charles Bell played that for us Saturday evening. It's a wonderful experience. Sitting listening, as we saw the pianola keyboard playing itself, one could almost "see" how young Gershwin "swung" through the lively notes he banged on the piano with its off beats, ran his fingers through it in quick passages, rolling his head, swinging his body, and tapping his feet when not required to press on the  pedals.And we got another one of his famous pieces, Porgy and Bess but entirely in music in something he called A Symphonic Picture, taking after Berlioz's symphonic poems.

We did not only have Gershwin. We also had Cole Porter (1891-1964)'s Kiss Me, Kate Overture, a Broadway adaptation of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew which ran for more than a thousand performances and won 4 Tony Awards in 1949. Perhaps the tough American wife always strikes a chord in the heart of every American husband? Whatever the truth may be, we got a chance to sample a musical version of it. Suddenly the clock was turned back and we're back into the 1940s!

Everyone knows that Leonard Berstein is a famous conductor of the NY Phil but how many know that he composed a number of broadway musicals too, like eg. Westside Story. But we did not have that. We had his On the Town: Three Dance Episodes, which premiered in 1944 about 3 sailors who had 24 hours to spend in NY. One can imagine the kind of noise, the hustle and bustle and the wild night life of 3 men on a fun spree with...what else? women !

Another American composer Aaron Copland also had a piece for us. It's his Rodeo, which premiered in 1942, a piece he wrote for a comic ballet. But he later rewrote it into an orchestral suite. We heard the last two movements" Saturday Night Waltz and Hoe Down.

It was a night when the orchestra players could appear in T-shirt and jeans, which they did. Bell, a tall young man, appeared on stage in a sleek tight black leather-like pants and matching T-shirt. All he lacked is a punk head! But he was great with the HKPO. It was fun from start to finish with hardly a break!  I love Broadway jazz.