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Programme Notes

GEORGE GERSHWIN (1898-1937)

AN AMERICAN IN PARIS

Gershwin had already written his best-known orchestral piece, Rhapsody in Blue, and played the solo piano at the 1924 première, when the conductor Walter Damrosch, impressed by the novelty and exuberance of the work, commissioned him to write a piano concerto and, soon afterwards, the orchestral portrait An American in Paris.

Paris in the twenties was an irresistible magnet for rich Americans: its place in the mythology of American intellectual life was firmly registered in the work of such writers as Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein; and when he sailed to Paris in the spring of 1928 Gershwin was following the path they had taken. There he met Diaghilev, Prokofiev, and Nadia Boulanger, and in Berlin Kurt Weill and Franz Lehar. An American in Paris, with Gershwin's customary fluency, followed soon afterwards. The work was premiered in December 1928 and recorded a few weeks later by the Symphony Orchestra of the Victor recording company under Gershwin's friend Nat Shilkret. Gershwin took the recording with great seriousness, and interfered so incessantly with rehearsals that Shilkret banned him from the studio, with the condition that during the actual takes he would be allowed to play the unimportant parts for piano and celeste.

And so An American in Paris was established as a concert work when Vincente Minelli took it up as a film ­ and as a vehicle for the leading dance star of 1950s cinema, Gene Kelly, with a plot devised by a team of writers, about a GI with ambitions to be a painter, but who can't make up his mind whether to go with a rich patron (Nina Foch) or a sweet ingénue, played by (once again) Leslie Caron. Kelly was the choreographer, and created for himself a 17-minute dance for the film's climax in which he resolves his dilemma - in Caron's favour. Gershwin himself said the music had no specific story-line, although it is hardly necessary to earmark the references to Paris traffic and hurrying crowds, the 'big city' atmosphere of the piece and the blues theme for the principal trumpet, homesick perhaps for New York.

An American in Paris was another movie with a celebrity cast. Among those present were Georges Guétary, Kirk Douglas, Ralph Richardson, Dana Andrews, Charles Dance and Lionel Jeffries. Besides the title work, a string of Gershwin songs were worked into the plot, including S'Wonderful, I Got Rhythm, Embraceable You and Our Love is Here to Stay. And once more, Oscars were rained upon the final product: six this time, including Best Picture.

Programme Notes by Paul Vaughan ©

 

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