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Category Archives: Critical Edition

Happy 100th to Rhapsody in Blue! Videos and Program Notes from Our Rhapsody in Blue Centennial Concert

We were thrilled to be able to share our centennial concert for Rhapsody in Blue and the four Gershwin musicals of 1924 with so many people at Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor on Sunday, February 11, 2024 — using George Gershwin’s own piano! It was amazing to have such a large and enthusiastic audience. Thank you so much to all who participated and to everyone who made it possible. Please read more about our program here! We are thrilled to share with you the video of Rhapsody in Blue in its original jazz band orchestration by Ferde Grofé using Ryan Raul […]

Rediscovering La, La, Lucille

In this post, Associate Editor Jacob Kerzner describes discovering materials that had been thought lost from George Gershwin’s first full musical, La, La, Lucille (1919), and some of the challenges of preparing the new critical edition. For our recordings of the rediscovered materials, please see this post. As the world celebrates the centennial of Rhapsody in Blue, many are marveling at the 25-year-old George Gershwin’s accomplished musicality. His rise to fame began four years earlier in April 1920 when Columbia Records released Al Jolson’s performance of his and Irving Caesar’s song “Swanee,” selling an estimated two million records.[1] But just […]

Ann Arbor Gershwin Centennial Festival 2024: “Rhapsody in Blue” and More…

February 2024 marks the 100th birthday of George Gershwin’s jazz piano concerto Rhapsody in Blue. To celebrate, the University of Michigan Gershwin Initiative in partnership with Ann Arbor’s landmark Michigan Theater (606 East Liberty in Ann Arbor) will host a Gershwin Centennial Celebration Concert on Sunday, Feb. 11, 2024 at 4:00 p.m. The event is free and open to the public, but requires an electronic, general admission ticket (reserve here). Please note: The start time for this event has been moved up to 4:00 p.m. A special feature of the concert will be the appearance of George Gershwin’s personal piano, a […]

Gershwin Centennial—100th Anniversary “Rhapsody in Blue” Edition Now Available

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of George Gershwin’s iconic concerto fusing classical music and jazz, The George and Ira Gershwin Critical Edition at the Univeristy of Michigan has published musicologist Ryan Raul Bañagale‘s landmark scholarly edition of the original 1924 jazz band version of Rhapsody in Blue, orchestrated by Ferde Grofé. The publication now makes the work’s full original musical notation—as it likely sounded when it was first premiered—available to Gershwin fans, music students, scholars, and performers. A signal voice in the American musical imagination, the melodies of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue were first heard on February 12, 1924 […]

Language in Porgy and Bess: The Challenge of Representing Gullah

Following Heather L. Hodges’s fantastic guest post about the Gullah Geechee culture that the Gershwins and Heywards portray in Porgy and Bess, we turn to one of the opera’s most contended aspects: its treatment of the Gullah language. In this post, our managing editor, Andrew S. Kohler, explores how the work’s text came to be so far removed from Gullah, and how future performances may approach the inconsistent libretto so as to give Gullah culture and language the respect they are due. The language of Porgy and Bess is a far cry from that of the Gullah community of Charleston […]

Introducing a New Series: The Past and Future of Porgy and Bess

Despite being among the most prominent operas of the twentieth century, and perhaps the Gershwin brothers’ most monumental achievement, Porgy and Bess occupies an uneasy place in US musical history. In this series, Managing Editor Andrew S. Kohler, Ph.D. and blog team leader Kai West explore the opera’s complex and at times problematic representations of race, gender, disability, and class, connecting Porgy and Bess to today’s conversations about social justice. The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess (1935), a collaboration with DuBose and Dorothy Heyward, contains many of the Gershwins’ most beloved numbers: “My Man’s Gone Now,” “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’,” […]

NOI+F’s New Recording of Concerto in F

The University of Maryland’s National Orchestral Institute + Festival (NOI+F) is back at it again with the release of a new album of American music featuring our critical edition of George’s Gershwin’s Concerto in F, performed by renowned pianist and Gershwin interpreter Kevin Cole! The album also includes performances of Joan Tower’s Sequoia, John Harbison’s Remembering Gatsby, and Walter Piston’s Symphony No. 5 under the direction of conductor David Alan Miller. Cole and Miller’s masterful performance of Gershwin’s concerto, edited by Tim Freeze, has already gotten national praise; check out Howard Reich’s review of the album for the Chicago Tribune, in […]

NOI+F’s An American in Paris

We are delighted to share that the University of Maryland’s National Orchestral Institute + Festival (NOI+F) has released a new album of American music featuring our critical edition of George’s Gershwin’s 1928 tone poem, An American in Paris! The album, titled Bernstein, Gershwin and Copland, also includes performances of Leonard Bernstein’s Songfest and Aaron Copland’s An Outdoor Overture under the direction of conductor James Judd. Judd’s performance of An American in Paris offers particular fidelity to the insights gleaned from Gershwin’s 1929 recording of the work that informs our edition. Find or stream this recording and others by the National […]

Interview with Timothy McAllister: Gershwin, Adams, and the Orchestral Saxophone

  The Gershwin Initiative’s own Lisa Keeney (lead editorial assistant and saxophonist) sat down in August 2016 to talk with Grammy award-winning saxophonist Timothy McAllister as a promotion for our September 2016 concert with the University of Michigan’s University Symphony Orchestra (USO). The USO premiered both the new edition of Concerto in F and the Unabridged Edition of An American in Paris. This program also featured Adams’ The Chairman Dances, and his Saxophone Concerto with soloist Timothy McAllister, for whom the concerto was written. We are delighted today to bring you the extended cut of the interview.  It is broken into three parts […]

U-M ORCHESTRA TO PERFORM NEW CRITICAL EDITIONS OF GERSHWIN MASTERPIECES

Today we’d like to share the wonderful piece Marilou Carlin wrote to feature our upcoming test performenace here in Ann Arbor.  This story first featured on the UM Arts and Culture page, which is well worth a visit! September 15, 2016 By Marilou Carlin George Gershwin (left), James Rosenberg, percussionist for Cincinnati Symphony (center), and tenor Richard Crooks (right), pose with taxi horns from “An American in Paris” on February 28, 1929. Photo courtesy the Ira & Leonore Gershwin Trusts.   The University Symphony Orchestra at the University of Michigan will perform two George Gershwin masterpieces—”An American in Paris” (1928) and “Concerto in F” (1925)—in new critical editions that reveal, for the first time in decades, the composer’s original intent for the […]

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