THE FLORIDA ORCHESTRA | 2018-2019 59
Program Notes
George Gershwin (1898-1937)
Porgy and Bess - Concert Suite
Duration: ca. 20 minutes
Had Gershwin lived into his 40s and beyond, who
knows what more he might have infused into
America’s nascent classical music scene, which
was struggling to find an identity removed from
European tradition. Gershwin’s demise began
slowly, but during a performance of his Concerto in
F with the San Francisco Symphony, people noticed
something wasn’t right. As he sat at the piano, he
lost his focus and balance. Then he blacked out.
A similar incident followed at a barber shop, but
Gershwin believed the headaches would pass, and
his doctors found no signs of what was a crippling
brain tumor. Soon, the 38-year-old composer,
now famous for Rhapsody in Blue, began dropping
forks and spilling glasses of water at dinner. By
the summer of 1937, a day after a neurosurgeon
conducted a spinal tap, Gershwin was dead.
Such an ignoble end stands in contrast to
Gershwin’s luminous career. Here was a man whose
life and work sparkled, who captured the infectious
gaiety of his time, and whose creative sense bridged
the gap between the popular and serious worlds of
music.
His first hit, Swanee, made him an overnight
sensation – and wealthy – at age 21. From that point,
he composed as if possessed. His deep reservoir of
melody helped give rise to the golden age of song
in the 1920s, and his skill as a composer for theater
landed him lucrative contracts in New York and
London, resulting in such musicals as Strike Up The
Band, Girl Crazy, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Of
Thee I Sing.
Rhapsody may have been his masterstroke, but his
lone opera – Porgy and Bess – takes pride of place in
the annals of American musical theater. Its subject,
a poor black community in South Carolina, offered
Gershwin a wealth of musical ideas that together
formed a natural link among jazz, folk, blues and
classical idioms. “If I am successful,” he once said of
his opera, “it will resemble the drama and romance
of Carmen and the beauty of Meistersinger.”
In the opera world, America wasn’t even on the map
until Gershwin and his brother Ira set music and
lyrics to DuBose Heyward’s 1925 novel about the
residents of Charleston’s Catfish Row tenement.
But Gershwin, a wealthy Jewish man from New
York, went deeper than writing catchy tunes. He
spent five weeks in South Carolina, absorbing
speech inflections of the area’s Gullah dialect, a
Creole blend of English and African languages.
He also insisted in the opera copyright that all
black characters be played by black singers. Porgy
was Gershwin’s first attempt to write for classically
trained voices, and the score makes demands on
the most skilled operatic singers. Unlike Broadway
and musical theater, Porgy and Bess is operatic in
that it requires singing from the chest, rather than
the head, isn’t amplified and pushes the limit on
vocal range.
Porgy and Bess, as we now know, remains
quintessentially American musical theater, although
opera companies almost always trim 90 minutes
from the original four hours. Many of its tunes
can stand by themselves in recitals: Summertime;
I Got Plenty of Nuttin’; It Ain’t Necessarily So; and
Bess, You Is My Woman. These are what many call
the Gershwin gems – rich in melody, inventive
syncopations and an early feel for swing.
Michael Tippett (1905-1998)
A Child of Our Time
Duration: ca. 75 minutes
In partnership with the Florida Holocaust Museum to
honor the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht.
On November 9, 1938, the Nazis unleashed a
wave of pogroms, state-sponsored terrorism,
against the Jews in Germany and Austria. Within