Gershwin conundrum for modern musicians

IT WAS TO HAVE been Tchaikovsky – the Rococo Variations with the Australia-based Irish cellist Emma-Jane Murphy – coupled with Holst’s The Planets by the RTÉ NSO at the National Concert Hall on Friday. But it ended up being Gershwin instead.

Holst and Gershwin actually made quite an interesting coupling, not least because of the stylistic gap that separates The Planets and Rhapsody in Blue.

Holst’s orchestral suite was completed in 1916 and premiered privately at the Queen’s Hall in London in 1918, through the beneficence of the privately wealthy Henry Balfour Gardiner (great-uncle of the conductor John Eliot Gardiner).

The first complete public performance took place in 1920.

Just four years later Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue created a stir at a concert that the dance-band leader Paul Whiteman arranged in New York and billed as an experiment in modern music. Gershwin said of the Rhapsody that he “heard it as sort of a musical kaleidoscope of America – of our vast melting pot, of our incomparable national pep, our blues, our metropolitan madness”. And, he claimed, he had “succeeded in showing that jazz is not merely a dance, it comprises bigger themes and purposes”.

The possibilities of a marriage of jazz and classical music never seemed quite as attractive as they did in the 1920s, and Gershwin has become the poster boy for those endeavours. The Planets was as mainstream European as English orchestral music had ever become. Rhapsody in Blue was the opposite of mainstream, representing a New World that wanted independence from a European past.

Both works remain problematic for performers. The Planets, with orchestrally resourceful treatments ranging from the chilling tread of Mars, the Bringer of War to the time-stilling Neptune, the Mystic, complete with offstage, wordless women’s chorus, tempts conductors to move into showpiece mode.

The Gershwin, which was scored by the Paul Whiteman Band’s arranger Ferde Grofé for both jazz band and symphony orchestra, is an awkward in-betweener from an age before the idea of musical crossover had the kind of currency it has today.

Friday’s performance of the Holst under the Australian conductor Matthew Coorey was from the in-your-face, spectacular mould, as if the effects that John Williams borrowed for his Star Wars movie scores were actually the raison d’etre of the piece. The Planets never fails to please an audience in that mode, but it gets cheapened in the process. Friday’s performance had the bonus of a sensitive, well-tuned account of the offstage chorus by members of New Dublin Voices.

Gershwin is even trickier for 21st-century musicians. As David Schiff has pointed out, when Rhapsody in Blue was new it was the band that provided the jazz and the solo piano that provided the classical tone.

Nowadays it’s usually the other way around, even when orchestral musicians or conductors do their homework and, in a spirit of authenticity – as was the case in Friday’s performance – reproduce nuances from the performances that Gershwin himself recorded.

For any soloist wishing to emulate the composer’s own playing the issue is not only that of reproducing what Gershwin the performer did but also of being meticulous about steering clear of what he so obviously avoided. And he certainly avoided the expressive rubato that classical pianists remain fond of, the kind that delves for expressivity by delaying key notes. It’s an approach that, as I have noted many times over the years, corrals Rhapsody in Blue into the well-worn ruts of the romantic concerto.

Don’t get me wrong. Audiences love it that way. And when played with the spirit that Philip Martin brought to it on Friday it’s quite a lot of fun. It’s just not what it was when it was new, and what it became famous for back in the 1920s. And Martin, who followed his performance with a clutch of Gershwin solos, strutted his romantic credentials large in these, too. The Man I Love, for instance, was turned into a kind of Rachmaninov prelude. That’s certainly not what Gershwin himself made it sound like.

So what should contemporary performers do? Try to mimic the style of the composer’s recordings? Go all scholarly, establish an urtext and get the period-performance police on the case? Or simply accept that performing tradition has got us where we are and let well enough alone, as audiences everywhere seem perfectly happy with the situation? Gershwin has been assimilated. His popular songs acquired standard status and have long been fertile material in the world of jazz. His concert works have been embraced and absorbed by classical musicians as part of the 20th-century canon. And Rhapsody in Blue now mostly speaks in the gentrified tones of an Eliza Doolittle who has been tutored by a Henry Higgins.

One thing that both Holst and Gershwin have in common, if you take their recordings as evidence – Holst recorded The Planets with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1926 – is that both men performed their music rather faster than you’re likely to hear it played today.

It will be the end of an era at the Irish Chamber Orchestra when its chief executive, John Kelly, retires at the end of the month. Anyone who has spent any time in Kelly’s company will know that he’s an irrepressible optimist whose ambition seems to know no limits, a man who could talk the hind leg off the proverbial donkey.

Back in 1993 he was not the first choice for the job. He took over at short notice when the original appointee left after only a matter of weeks. In what seems like no time at all Kelly had transformed an orchestra that was largely a spare-time activity for musicians on the RTÉ payroll, and based in Dublin, into a group of 13 independently contracted players based at the University of Limerick.

The new-style ICO, with the violinist Fionnuala Hunt as artistic director and an average age under 30, made its debut in February 1995, with a tour that took it to Nenagh, Dublin, Schull and Clonmel. The following year saw the establishment of an ICO festival at St Flannan’s Cathedral, in Killaloe. Former president Mary Robinson became chair of the ICO board, Ed Walsh, former president of the University of Limerick, her deputy.

Kelly talked of a new venue in Killaloe, and, although he didn’t quite achieve that, in 2008 the ICO moved into a new €3.5 million building on the university campus, giving the orchestra its own rehearsal cum recording studio, office space and storage facilities.

Artistically, however, in spite of many excellent performances, his achievements have been less even. Cogent, attractive programme planning will be a key area for his successor to sort out.