Lydia Jardon

Dialogues

A repertoire is not the result of systematic research. It was chance meetings that led me to work on Rachmaninoff and Gershwin at the same time, composers who were so different at first sight. However, it quickly seemed to me that a dialogue was born from their works and that, beyond the music, the two men had much to share. But it took more than my impressions as a performer to justify such a rapprochement and the making of a record.

It was also necessary to respect the spirit, especially as both composers had recorded their works: the authenticity of a recording, even if it cannot be totally separated from the technical conditions of the time, prevails over the refinements of musicology. I have therefore tried to conform not to a tradition, but to a heritage.

The idea began to become clear when I discovered the existence of Walter Damrosch. He was a conductor, one of those great conductors who imported the European repertoire to turn-of-the-century America and made it shine. It was with him that Rachmaninoff premiered his Third Concerto in New York in November 1909. But it was also with him that Gershwin premiered his Concerto in F in 1925, and An American in Paris in 1928. I thought I had found my mediator in this German-born conductor, placed in the middle of the old European tradition and the beginnings of American musical life. So I was only half surprised to discover that Rachmaninoff had attended the New York premiere of Rhapsody in Blue in February 1924, not under Damrosch's direction (that was Paul Whiteman) but in his presence, as well as those of Kreisler, Heifetz, Godowsky and Stravinsky. So Rachmaninoff and Gershwin met and talked. All that remained was for me to try to reconnect the threads of their dialogue, if not through words, then at least through notes, and to try to find out why such a meeting was written into their respective musical destinies. I thought I saw three keys in this dialogue: language, ideas and culture.

What is most immediately noticeable is the similarity of the two composers' technical means and language. They are both endowed with impressive pianistic abilities. As is often the case when composers are also performers, their work is first and foremost virtuoso. It should be remembered that Hofmann, the dedicatee of the Third Concerto, refused to play it, and that the first performances of the Rhapsody, by anyone other than Gershwin, were fairly mediocre.

This virtuosity is primarily that of brilliant improvisers. Accustomed to the stage, Rachmaninoff and Gershwin composed largely for the public, listening to the audience. Rachmaninoff rarely played the whole of his Preludes: he chose them according to the reactions he perceived from the audience. This is probably the reason for a certain impression of ease. They write music with their fingers, and the two works took no more than a few months to complete. Improvisation, the pleasure of the fingers, seduction and the intoxication of the stage are undeniable common features. But it is clear, at the same time, that these are the features of twentieth-century culture. It is therefore not surprising that they have withstood criticism, even from their peers (Stravinsky saw Rachmaninoff as nothing more than film music), and have conquered the public without interruption since then.

Let us now look at the ideas. Here we have a concerto and a rhapsody. The differences in structure are obvious. Yet where can this impression of unity between the works come from, beyond the movements and themes? First of all, of course, the writing, which is compact, fast even in the slow parts, which are not so slow in fact. These are works in which there is little rest and in which the listener is just as much in demand as the artist. In both cases, a succession of short scenes are grafted onto a relatively stable musical setting: the orchestral phrase in Rachmaninoff's work, the famous Gershwin theme. On the background theme, the ear jumps from one phrase to the next and both works live entirely on the mobility they impose on the listener. Even if he did not mean it in that sense, Stravinsky's comparison is apt, it is cinema: wide shots and close-ups, vast movements and still shots, cutaways and sequences.

Behind the ample construction, both works are successions of short forms, and this is not surprising for these two composers. Rachmaninoff loved short forms: his Songs and Preludes are examples of this. He was always looking for concision. For Gershwin, it is even more obvious: he is a man of songs, some of which were composed in less than an hour. Of course, this is a demanding path: conciseness does not tolerate mediocrity and this is probably also why some of their works are less good than others. But what's the point of going on and on when the art is precisely in the movement.

This construction is perhaps simply the spirit of the times. Both works are American. For Gershwin, this speaks for itself. As for Rachmaninoff, it is a work composed for the American public and performed before them for the first time. It is the teenage America of the turn of the century.

Everything is ephemeral, everything is made and unmade in an instant, but the movement is clear. America is being built, it knows where it is going, it knows its ambitions. Rachmaninoff foresaw it, Gershwin fully lived it. A New World Concerto, a New World Rhapsody.

But how would these two works be possible without a culture to share? Until now, everything had seemed to me to be leaning towards America. Yet I was beginning to feel that their culture was indeed that of old Europe. In 1909, Rachmaninoff was still totally Russian. Despite his travels and cosmopolitanism, there was no reason to expect that war and revolution would send him to America eight years later and for the rest of his life. The liberalisation of Russia, despite real progress, remained slow. He was a liberal and the reasons that made him reject tsarist totalitarianism could only be those that would later make him reject the October Revolution. What is and will remain Russian for him is his cultural heritage, the one that makes him compose. His life was already elsewhere. As long as Russia was still relatively open, he stayed there. But when he realises that it is going to cut itself off from the world and cut him off from his public, he will choose his public and, as a price to pay for freedom, he will first become an interpreter.

As for Gershwin, the game is already up. America was not his choice, it was that of his parents, who emigrated in 1891. Yet he too was Russian, and even Russian Jewish. His family followed the huge stream of emigrants at the end of the 19th century.

At this time, between Ireland earlier and Italy later, it was Central and Eastern Europe that provided the strongest contingents. It is striking to discover Gershwin's entourage: Germans, Russians, Jews or not, the communities are recreated. This is of course only an anecdote, but let us think of the famous Al Jolson, who immortalised, under a Black Minstrel make-up, the song Swanee, one of Gershwin's most popular and the first of the talking movies in 1927. Al Jolson was a Russian Jew from St Petersburg, son of a rabbi and, for a time, a synagogue cantor. A curious fate.

Europe fascinates Gershwin. He felt that his 'serious' work should be inspired by it. He visited Ravel and Berg, was intimate with Schönberg at the end of his life, and always with a thirst for learning that made these composers smile at the extent of the composer's musical abilities. His dream, and his end, will be an opera, certainly very American, but is there any musical form more European than opera? This dialogue of the two worlds is at the heart of Gershwin's culture, in music as in painting: he was a good painter and of very good taste in his passion for early European painting. Why the blue of his rhapsody? One thinks of the blues but it is probably more a reminiscence of the colour symbolism of certain European composers, especially Debussy ("the flats of Pelléas et Mélisande"). There is a symphony in pink and grey, it is by... Claude Monet.

The Mecca of these mixtures was, of course, New York. Gershwin, like almost every New Yorker of the time, was only a generation away from Europe. All the influences were there, and his musical whirlwind was no accident. Literature remained Anglo-Saxon and showed immense vitality, but could not yet unify a world made up of disparate communities. Music, by contrast, is the language of immigrant Europe. Musical life is astonishingly rich and diverse. The same musicians imported the most serious European music (Damrosch was one of the great promoters of Wagner), developed popular music, and gave jazz symphonic colours. Carnegie Hall received Verdi as well as Gershwin. One can imagine Garnier receiving Franz Lehar at the time: contemporary music may be, a touch of scandal sometimes, but not popular music. That's the miracle: American musical life at the time was not a place of science and tradition, but of innovation, mixing and dialogue. It is not surprising that Rachmaninoff also found a place of expression there, provisional in 1909, definitive thereafter.

This dialogue between Europe and America is truly that of our century, and it began with music. It will perhaps be tomorrow's dialogue between America and Europe, now largely unified, and Asia. Today, we feel the extent to which European classical music contributes to the dialogue between the West and the East. Songs and films have been privileged instruments of this dialogue. Rachmaninov and Gershwin are undoubtedly among the precursors. They spoke to each other, they still speak to us.

Lydia Jardon