Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue and Concerto in F – Previn

Some recordings just refuse to die, and thank goodness for that.

EMI has hauled André Previn’s 1971 Gershwin album out of the vault yet again, this time dressed in the sober gray livery of the label’s “Masters” series — a considerable comedown from the original LP jacket, which showed the young Previn standing amid clouds and stars in denim and a paisley cravat, looking like a man who had wandered off the set of a Beatles picture and into a recording studio. I miss that cover. It told you something true about the interpretation inside: sophisticated, a little cheeky, utterly confident of its own charm.

Previn made this record when he was music director of the London Symphony Orchestra, and you can hear an orchestra playing for a maestro it trusts, not merely for a famous name at the podium. The clarinetist Gervase de Peyer opens the Rhapsody in Blue with that notorious seventeen-note smear and does it without vulgarity, without the cartoonish leer some American orchestras bring to it. Ferde Grofé’s 1926 orchestration, the full symphonic version rather than the leaner jazz-band original of 1924, gives the winds and brass plenty of chances to preen, and the LSO’s principals take them. The trumpet playing in the slow movement of the Concerto in F, the famous “blues” tune, marked Andante con moto, belongs to Howard Snell, and it has real ache in it, real portamento, without a trace of self-pity.

Previn plays the piano parts himself, conducting from the keyboard in the Concerto, and here is where opinions divide. He was, by 1971, already a legitimate jazz pianist of some reputation — he’d cut trio records for Contemporary in the 1950s, worked with Shelly Manne — and one might expect a hard swing, a Harlem stride inflection, something raffish. One would be wrong, and rightly so. Previn plays Gershwin the way Rachmaninoff might have played Gershwin: big tone, rhythmic backbone as steady as a metronome, rubato applied with a jeweler’s restraint rather than a barroom flourish. I’ve sat through performances, I won’t name the pianists, some of them still living, who treat the solo passages as an excuse for five minutes of free jazz noodling that Gershwin never wrote and never wanted. Oscar Levant didn’t do that. Earl Wild didn’t do that, even in his own dazzling, souped-up cadenzas. Previn doesn’t do it either. Good.

Bernstein’s version, the 1959 Columbia disc with the Philharmonic, Bernstein conducting from the keyboard as here, remains the great rival, and it is a different animal entirely: more extroverted, more overtly “composed” in its rubato, occasionally over-inflected in a way that grew worse, not better, as Bernstein aged and repeated the piece in later years. Previn’s reading is cooler, cleaner, closer to the spirit of a composer who orchestrated with a Broadway man’s ear but structured with a symphonist’s patience. Whether that’s a virtue depends on your taste for hot sauce. I find I want the coolness, most days.

An American in Paris is where this record still earns its keep, decades on. The taxi horns honk with exactly the right vulgar insouciance, not tuned to some absurd purist standard, but blatting away like real Parisian traffic circa 1928, tuned A, B-flat, D, and a low A, the pitches Gershwin himself specified after buying the horns on the Rue de la Paix. The bluesy trumpet tune returns with an ache that Previn lets breathe, never rushing toward the peroration, and the closing pages have a swagger that feels earned rather than manufactured. It’s a performance that trusts the tunes. It doesn’t try to improve on Gershwin, doesn’t try to make him into Ravel or Copland. It just lets him be himself, brassy and homesick and a little sentimental.

Previn revisited this repertoire in Pittsburgh for Philips in the 1980s, technically cleaner, digitally recorded, and in some ways just as accomplished. But that later version lacks the sonic bloom EMI’s engineers captured at Abbey Road in 1971, and it lacks, too, a certain youthful swagger in Previn’s own playing that time had gently filed away. This is the one to own. Get past the packaging, get past the ghost of that denim jacket, if you must, and you’ll find playing of unforced elegance, idiomatic without ever curdling into kitsch. Fifty-some years on, it still sounds like a party you wish you’d been invited to.