Friday, August 7, 2020

George Gershwin (1898-1937)


This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from November 9, 2012. It can be found in our archives at http://archive.org/details/InMemoriamGeorgeGershwin



 =====================================================================

Today's peek into the Podcast Vault feeds our ongoing Project 366 musical alphabet with an aliteration for the letter G, with the initials of today's featured composer, George Gershwin.

As I wrote in the original post from 2012, George Gershwin left us on July 11, 1937, two months shy of his 40th birthday. One can only speculate as to what great things Gershwin could have done had he lived 40 more years. He’d only spent a few years working in Hollywood, and had already one major opera under his belt. There probably would have been more films, possibly more music for the concert hall or the opera house…

The bulk of Gershwin’s output was for the theatre: well over 15 musicals, and hundreds of songs. This is where we will spend most of today’;s montage, exploring the many, many orchestral and jazz adaptations of many of these songs.

The montage closes with a studio rendition of his Rhapsody in Blue with a vintage piano roll cut by Gershwin himself serving as soloist.

As filler this week, I thought I would point you to a YouTUbe playlist which features a 1976 all-Gershwin piano album with Andre Watts as soloist.



I think you will (still) love this music too.

No comments:

Post a Comment