GEORGE GERSHWIN COMPOSES CONCERTO.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18772, 30 May 1929, Page 6

GEORGE GERSHWIN COMPOSES CONCERTO.

AMERICAN DECLARED ARNOLD BENNETT OF MUSICAL WORLD,

George Gershwin, whose “New York” concerto for piano is issued by Columbia, is the Arnold Bennett of music, lie is a realist first and a sentimentalist last (writes Dorean in an April number of “John o’ London’s Weekly”). He deliberately wrote pot-boilers to live on (not about the Five Towns, but about five musical comedies, “Lady Be Good,” “Tell Me More,” “Tip Toes,” “Oh! Kay.” and “Funny Face”) with the intention of writing better stuff when he could afford it. And, like Arnold Bennett, he can now afford it A Man with Two Publics. He started life at seventeen in a New York publisher’s office. At thirty he finds himself with a vast public that likes pep in its music, and a smaller and more discriminating public that ts beginning to ta.ke him seriously. His aspiration is to found a new school of American music on the best elements of jazz, particularly that of syncopation, and the famous “Rhapsody in Blue” was his first step along this untrodden path. The piano concerto, which he was commissioned to w’rite for the New York Symphony Society, in 1925, was the second. It was performed in the December of that year, with Mr Gershwin (who is a brilliant pianist) as the soloist and Mr Walter Damrosch as conductor. That Sinking Feeling. The music, needless to say, is not everybody’s meat. Parts of it (the first appearance of the main theme in the first movement, for instance) would, I think, give ninety-nine men out of a hundred that sinking feeling. But, as sinking feelings do, it wears off, and when you come to the fine climax at the end of the,movement you are possibly just beginning to enjoy the sail. What gives the theme its tartness is a wandering inner part which keeps slipping off the edge of the key as Charlie Chaplin slips off the tightrope —one leg wobbling desperatel}-, the other clawing vainh at the air. It is almost as though fifty-nine members of the band were playing “There is a happy land” and the sixtieth, with black murder in his heart and a powerful trombone in his hands, suddenly tried to wreck the show with “Annie Laurie.” The tunes are not the kind you would whistle in the street, but they are not without a certain barbaric effectiveness. What Gershwin seems to lack is the ability to develop them. After all, Beethoven’s tunes are often very ordinary ; it is what he made of them that matters. As Albert Chevalier used to sing, “It ain’t exackly what 'e says—it’s the narsty way ’e sez it.” Gershwin. like Grieg, often falls back on the poverty-stricken device of repeating a phrase several times on different degrees of the scale. The same thing s is true of his harmony. He is too fond of merely sliding about chromatically (a) with all the parts going the same way, or (b) with some going up and some going down. Monotony. But the chief weakness of his style, it seems to me, is this: he has taken a small fragment of musical equipment--syncopation or broken rhythm; it really ‘ comes to the same thing—and pondering over it until it has

become his whole world. What was invented as a device to produce contrast has ended by destroying contrast, and if his music is to live he will have to'give us a few more steady threes and fours to break the monotony. Sidney Cooper painted so many sheep that he could paint nothing else; Farquharson painted so many Scottish cows that they never came home. Gershwin must avoid the same trap, and I think he is wide awake enough to do it. But whether he will do for American music what Bartok has done for Hungarian music remains to be seen. In the meantime this concerto will deeply interest all those who are not content with mere surface impressions.