Concerto in F

“Good jazz, bad Liszt,” said Diaghilev of Gershwin’s Concerto in F. Witty comment, unfair criticism. Gershwin was not trying to emulate Liszt or anyone else in particular. Commissioned to write a piano concerto for the New York Symphony Orchestra by its conductor Walter Damrosch - who had been much impressed by the Rhapsody in Blue - he certainly wanted to create something recognisably in the same tradition as the great classical and romantic concertos in the orchestral repertoire. He even went so far, he said, as “buying four or five books on musical structure to find out what the concerto form actually was!” Fortunately, the books do not seem to have retained him for very long. It is true that the Concerto in F is in three movements, with an Adagio in the middle and a kind of rondo at the end, but there’s little else conventional about it.

Before Gershwin gave the first performance in the Carnegie Hall in 1925, with Damrosch and the New York Symphony, no one had ever heard a piano concerto beginning with a resounding tattoo on timpani, cymbal and side-drum, hints of Charleston rhythm on brass and strings, and a Charleston tune on bassoon. And no one had ever heard the piano make its first entry with a blues melody. The whole of the first movement is actually based on these two elements, Charleston and blues. They alternate with each other, passing backwards and forwards between piano and orchestra, frequently changing their shape and stimulating a variety of virtuoso effects from the soloist. Before there can be any hint of a failure in momentum Gershwin introduces a new tune - there’s a particularly good one in the very middle - or an episode of ragtime or new kind of cadenza. The climax occurs at the point where, after a fairly obvious lead-in, the blues melody is presented in the romantic grand manner by the strings decked out with a panoply of heroic chords on the piano. But that’s not the end: the percussion tattoo is dramatically recalled and the movement runs out, brilliantly, in Charleston rhythm.

Another book Gerswhin bought in preparation for his work on the Concerto in F - since he had always handed his scoring over to someone else up till then - was the then standard textbook on orchestration by Cecil Forsyth. It cannot have been in Forsyth, however, that he found inspiration for the nocturnal introduction to the Adagio, a highly atmospheric New York blues with nostalgic trumpet and drawling clarinets. As in the first movement, the piano goes its own way, ignoring the orchestra’s blues at first in favour of its own, more animated dance tune. But, after a persuasively wistful violin solo and a recall of the introductory nocturne, the piano does conform by introducing a new blues melody, which becomes the subject of all-round passionate interest until the last, attenuated recall of the nocturne.

In the final Allegro piano and orchestra are in consistent agreement, above all in projecting the energy contained in the heavily percussive repeated notes of the theme presented at the start. Between the reappearances of that theme they collude too in alluding, more or less directly, to tunes from the earlier movements. Most directly of all, after a dramatic stroke of a gong and a pregnant pause, they join in a full-scale climax of the blues tune originally introduced by the piano on its very first entry in the opening Allegro. The percussion tattoo and the Charleston are not forgotten either.

Gerald Larner©2003