by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Afterwards Charles and I watched a PBS Great Performances special with the awkward title Herbie
Hancock, Gustavo Dudamel and the L.A. Philharmonic Celebrate Gershwin, which apparently had its origins in a Los Angeles
Philharmonic concert but was cut down to fit into an hour of screen time. The
big ballyhoo was over jazz pianist Hancock playing the solo part in Rhapsody
in Blue, his first appearance — at least
that’s what the claim was — playing a “classical” piece, albeit one with jazz flavoring,
and following a notated score instead of improvising. Actually he did improvise, briefly, in one of the solo passages,
playing his part in a Charleston rhythm and adding a few extra notes, but
nothing like the wholesale rewriting and rethinking of the part some pianists
are bringing to it today (to the arrogant sniffery of the critics from American
Record Guide and Fanfare) on the ground that if a classical piece drew on
jazz devices, it should be O.K. to play it as jazz and improvise on it. Hancock’s
brief walk on his jazz side didn’t hurt the Rhapsody much but it didn’t help it much either, and at one
point Dudamel leaned over to Hancock and looked at him as he played one of the
long unaccompanied piano sections. I suspect that was an oddball tribute to
what went down at the premiere, where Gershwin had been so rushed he hadn’t had
time to write out all the piano part and at one point he told conductor Paul
Whiteman he would play his solo by heart and nod towards him when he was done
and Whiteman should bring the band back in. Whiteman’s conductor’s score
survives and actually has the notation, “Wait for nod,” at that point. The show
began with Dudamel and the orchestra playing An American in Paris and, because it ran only an hour, the only selection
they had time for between American
and the Rhapsody was what was
alleged to be a solo-piano version of “Someone to Watch Over Me” but was
actually about five minutes of Hancock (seemingly) aimlessly noodling at the
piano before anything recognizable as Gershwin’s tune emerged. In both American and Rhapsody (which he played in the later symphony-orchestra version rather than
the wilder and more rambunctious one arranger Ferde Grofé created for the
Whiteman band’s premiere) Dudamel conducted surprisingly slowly, clearly more
interested in — and more at home with — the pieces’ more lyrical sections. Even
though at one point Dudamel broke out into a mini-Charleston on the podium
during one of the faster sections of An American in Paris, it was clear he was conducting both big works more
slowly than most people and savoring their more lyrical sections. That’s not
necessarily the way I want to
hear Gershwin — my favorite Gershwin conductors are Whiteman and Nathaniel
Shilkret (whose 1929 record of An American in Paris, the first one, is still the champ as far as I’m
concerned) from the 78 era and Michael Tilson Thomas more recently (and his Gershwin celebrations with the L.A. Philharmonic
included great pop voices like Sarah Vaughan to sing the fabulous songs), who can savor the lyrical
sections and give the needed
jazzy “oomph” to the fast parts — but it’s a measure of how great Gershwin’s
music is that it can hold up and still make its effect even with a conductor
like Dudamel blandly plowing through the jazzier portions to get to the slower,
more lyrical, more self-consciously “classical” sections that really turn him
on.
