Michael Tilson Thomas and Gershwin

The conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, who had died age 81, was devoted to the music of George Gershwin. He came by that interest naturally - both his father and grandfather were friends with the composer.

So when MTT (as he was known) began recording as a young conductor, it was natural for him to turn to the Gershwin catalog for material.

Today we will examine some of the fruits of his exploration, in the form of his 1976 LP of the Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris. An added attraction is MTT's 1983 recording of the Second Rhapsody, in its original form.

For more about Thomas' life and career, the New York Times had a very good obituary (gift link). Here, it's sufficient to note that he was a gifted conductor, pianist, composer and orchestra builder who was widely admired.

Rhapsody in Blue

The Rhapsody in Blue recording was something of a technical feat at the time. The idea of Columbia producers Tom Shepard and Andrew Kazdin, it featured the original "jazz band" orchestration as conducted by Thomas, accompanying Gershwin himself, with the performance taken from a piano roll the composer had made.

Producing the recording was a chore. The solo piano part on the roll had been augmented by additional notes designed to represent the accompaniment. So the producers laboriously covered over each of those punched accompaniment notes on the roll, leaving just the solo part. MTT then conducted the band while the player piano did its thing.

George Gershwin

The result is surprisingly effective. Gershwin's brisk pace is different from the somewhat sentimentalized readings that are often heard, and the pungent original Ferde Grofé orchestration is right in step with that approach. The members of the "Columbia Jazz Band" are unidentified except for clarinetist Charles Russo, who is credited with the famous opening clarinet glissando.

The recording is vivid, although the solo instruments had a tendency to pop out of the background in a different acoustic from the piano. I've added a small amount of natural reverb to the band (not the piano) to address this issue.

The Rhapsody of course premiered in 1924 in a performance with Paul Whiteman's orchestra. The composer and Whiteman's band then recorded the work in truncated form for Victor. Because the performance was abbreviated, and because it was done via a recording horn rather than the electrical method that would soon come into use, it has been at times overlooked. That recording appeared on this blog some time ago, and I have now revisited the sound, which is one of the best acoustic recordings I have heard. You can find it here. You'll notice that Gershwin is less relentless in this performance than he is on the piano roll - although fast tempos were more the norm than the exception in his pianism. That post linked above also includes several of his piano recordings, which tend to be quite brisk.

Gershwin also recorded the Rhapsody electrically a few years later, but I believe that was with the expanded "symphonic" arrangement that Grofé had prepared.

An American in Paris

Thomas and Columbia used the New York Philharmonic for the recording of Gershwin's 1928 piece An American in Paris. Rightfully so - the conductor of one of the orchestra's, predecessors, Walter Damrosch of the New York Symphony had commissioned the work. This time the composer wrote his own, highly effective orchestrations, auto horns and all.

Michael Tilson Thomas in 1985

An American in Paris is not afflicted by the urtext confusion that besets Rhapsody in Blue and its successor, the Second Rhapsody.

MTT conducts a charming, idiomatic performance of the piece, which was well recorded in Columbia's 30th Street Studio, a former church.

Gershwin himself appears on an early recording of An American in Paris, playing the celeste while Nathaniel Shilkret conducted. On that one - which can be heard on the same set as the acoustic Rhapsody - the Victor engineers emphasized the auto horns and xylophone to a distracting degree.

Second Rhapsody

Gershwin's unloved (not by me!) sequel to Rhapsody in Blue - the Second Rhapsody - started out as an assignment for the 1931 Janet Gaynor film Delicious. Gershwin was excited by the music he composed, which turned out to be much longer than was needed for the film. So he produced a cut down version for filmic use which came to be called Rhapsody in Rivets. Gershwin had the full Second Rhapsody recorded for his own purposes, and then it languished.

When the piece was finally published in the early 1950s, the publisher had had it reorchestrated by Robert McBride. So the original had seldom been heard until Thomas and Columbia had new parts made from the autograph score and recorded it with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1982-83 sessions.

At the time of he release, MTT sat for an interview with David Patrick Stearns for High Fidelity, which turned into a gushing article in which Thomas claimed - somewhat incomprehensibly - to have a "Gershwin gyroscope" and the writer posited that MTT's was the first recording of Gershwin's original version.

Trouble was, it wasn't the first. Gershwin biographer Edward Jablonski wrote the magazine to point out the composer's own run through, which had been released much later on. Also, Columbia - MTT's own label - had recorded the original version in 1949 with Oscar Levant and the Morton Gould Orchestra. Levant had championed the piece when it was nearly forgotten.

How does MTT compare with Levant? Well, the later version is certainly good and well worth hearing. But Oscar's is more strongly characterized and makes a better case for this fine music. It also provides a more truthful impression of an orchestra in a real acoustic, although the LA recording is certainly not bad.

The Levant-Gould version was one of the first records I ever posted, back in 2008. I've remastered the sound on that 10-inch LP, which includes the also-unloved "I Got Rhythm" Variations and the better regarded Three Preludes.

The interview and Jablonski riposte are included in the download, along with relevant reviews.

LINK to Michael Tilson Thomas recordings

LINK to Oscar Levant recording