Jeffrey Kahane, the Colorado Symphony’s music director and a renowned pianist, writes about the orchestra’s upcoming program showcasing modern and contemporary American music.
Our American Showcase sprang from an idea I had to celebrate the many and wondrous ways that popular music, with its enormous range and variety of styles and genres, has interacted with and so enriched the classical and symphonic traditions in America.
I knew, for starters, that I wanted to build a program around the Gershwin Piano Concerto, which for me remains the American piano concerto.
Whatever it lacks in formal perfection – and no one claims that George
Gershwin achieved that – is more than compensated for by Gershwin’s incomparable melodic and harmonic gifts, and the sheer, irresistible vibrancy of its rhythms and orchestral sound.
I’ve played the work for more than two decades, and I never tire of it; it’s the kind of piece that I can always walk out onstage and feel confident that everyone in the hall is going to have a great time.
In fact, one of the very first things that came to mind when I was appointed music director was how much I looked forward to conducting this piece from the keyboard with my wonderful colleagues.
We’ll do Aaron Copland’s masterpiece, the ballet “Appalachian Spring,” in its exquisitely crafted original version for 13 players. While Gershwin brought to bear on his symphonic works his great gifts in the jazz and popular song idiom, “Appalachian Spring” draws its inspiration from the American folk tradition, most specifically in its final sections based on the beloved Shaker tune “Simple Gifts.”
Like Gershwin in his concerto, this is an American master at the height of his creative powers, writing music that is at the highest level of inspiration and immediately accessible and exciting.
While a great many outstanding American composers have shied away from the use of, or even reference to, popular genres in their work, two of my favorite younger composers, Kevin Puts and Kenji Bunch, have in very different but equally engaging ways written virtuoso orchestral works that brilliantly bridge the worlds of classical and popular music.
Puts’ Third Symphony, “Vespertine,” is partly inspired by the work of the Icelandic pop singer, Bjork. Without actually ever quoting from her songs, he makes fascinating use of certain aspects of her sonic and gestural vocabulary in composing a compact and genuinely powerful symphony that uses a strikingly beautiful and beguiling orchestral palette.
Bunch’s Symphony No. 1: “Lichtenstein Triptych” is inspired by the pop artist Roy Lichtenstein. Like the artwork itself, the music draws on a whole range of American popular idioms to create a work that is humorous, touching, dazzling and sure to delight the audience.
We’re going to end the concert in a blaze of high spirits with music from the brief but glorious heyday of ragtime, the quintessentially American music that is distinct from but ultimately evolved into jazz.
Scott Joplin, the “king of ragtime,” as he was called in his own day, called his rags “classic rags” and insisted that they be played with the same care and seriousness of other classical music. I can’t think of a better way to cap a celebration like this than a few of these infectiously joyous pieces from the turn of the last century.
Performances of the Colorado Symphony’s American showcase are set for Thursday, Feb. 24 and Feb. 26 in Boettcher Concert Hall. Tickets: $15-$65 via 303-623-7876 or coloradosymphony.org.
