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George Gershwin: Works
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George Gershwin is one of the Twentieth Century’s most revered composers. Despite his premature death at 38 his output is outstanding. By 1913 he was working as a pianist and became a staff composer for a publishing firm in 1917. His first hit was “Swanee” (1918) which became a huge success for Al Jolson when it was added to the show Sinbad in 1919.
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Throughout his career George Gershwin wrote many great compositions and his work is still quite popular today. When he fell in a coma in 1937, the White House sent two of its destroyers to get the best brain surgeon in the country, who was vacationing in the Chesapeake Bay, to California in order to try and help Gershwin. Unfortunately, the effort would go unrewarded. The coma ended George Gershwin’s life just short of his 39th birthday on July 11, 1937 in Hollywood, California.
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When George was 14, his mother enrolled him in the High School of Commerce. He only stayed one year because he started entertaining at a Catskills resort. Gershwin had been paid $5 a week. He liked that kind of work. He decided to go job-hunting in Tin Pan Alley.
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Aside from the French influence, Gershwin was intrigued by the works of Alban Berg, Dmitri Shostakovich, Igor Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, and Arnold Schoenberg. He ... asked Schoenberg for composition lessons. Schoenberg refused, saying "I would only make you a bad Schoenberg, and you're such a good Gershwin already".[20] (This quote is similar to one credited to Maurice Ravel during Gershwin's 1928 visit to France -- "Why be a second-rate Ravel, when you are a first-rate Gershwin?" See the Wikipedia article for Maurice Ravel.)
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In the summer of 1937 George Gershwin died suddenly from a brain tumour at the age of 38. His tragically early death stunned the world. A composer of classical and popular music, he had summed up the unique qualities of what is meant by "American music". This book sheds fresh light on the man and includes exclusive interviews with musicians who knew him, material from the Gershwin family archives and coverage of the composer's musical works in full.
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The Madison Symphony Orchestra has an association with Gershwin that predates even the 1934 concert. In 1929, just a few years after the score was published, the orchestra's first conductor, Dr. Sigfrid Prager, programmed the Rhapsody in Blue. Prager himself played the difficult solo part, the first full-scale performance of the Rhapsody in Madison. [This weekend,] John DeMain and the orchestra present "Classic Gershwin," an all-Gershwin program featuring three of Gershwin's foremost contemporary interpreters. Pianist Leon Bates, who has made a specialty of Gershwin's virtuoso piano works, will perform both the Rhapsody in Blue and the "I Got Rhythm" Variations. The orchestra will have its own showcase, Gershwin's picturesque--and notoriously difficult --An American in Paris.
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