Gershwin Piano Works – Corinna Simon

Something happens in the hands of a pianist who has spent thirty years teaching Czerny to teenagers and then falls, late and hard, for Gershwin. Corinna Simon, who has built her reputation in German conservatories rather than on Broadway or in the Hollywood Bowl, brings an unexpected discipline to this repertoire. Discipline, oddly enough, turns out to be exactly what Gershwin needs.

Most pianists get Gershwin wrong in the same way. They think the syncopations are an invitation to showboat, that “I Got Rhythm” exists so you can prove how loose your wrists are. Simon does not fall for this. She has clearly listened, really listened, to the 1920s, to the language of stride and blues inflection as it actually sounded before it calcified into cocktail-lounge cliché. Her “Fascinating Rhythm” has snap without swagger. Her “Strike Up the Band” struts but never preens. There is a difference, and not every pianist who plays Gershwin knows it.

The song-book selections, that whole constellation of tunes from “Swanee” through “Liza,” by way of “‘S Wonderful” and “Do Do Do,” are transcriptions Gershwin himself made, hastily, for the player-piano and sheet-music trade, and they are trickier than they look on the page. Get too reverent and they turn to mush; get too cute and they turn to kitsch. Simon threads it, mostly. “The Man I Love” breathes with a rubato that feels improvised even though every note is fixed. “Somebody Loves Me” has an ache to it I did not expect from someone trained, presumably, on Beethoven sonatas and Brahms intermezzi.

The Three Preludes fare beautifully. The outer two crackle with a jazzy, almost stabbing attack. The middle one, marked Andante con moto e poco rubato though nobody remembers that, unfolds with a blue, unhurried melancholy that never curdles into sentimentality.

Rhapsody in Blue in the solo-piano version is the disc’s real curiosity, and its real triumph. We forget, mostly, that Gershwin recorded this piece for Duo-Art piano rolls by layering two different takes, a bit of studio trickery decades before multitrack tape existed, a pianistic sleight of hand nobody quite copped to at the time. Simon plays it straight, one performer, two hands, and somehow it works: she manages the orchestral gestures, the clarinet whoop reduced to a keyboard glissando, the big tune stated with unforced grandeur, without ever sounding like she is apologizing for the absence of a band. Compare this with the old Ivan Davis LP, or more recent efforts by pianists determined to out-virtuoso the piece. Simon’s version has more charm than fireworks. I mean that as high praise.

Then there are the scraps: Merry Andrew, the Impromptu in Two Keys, Three-Quarter Blues, each barely over a minute, tossed-off occasional pieces Gershwin probably wrote between rehearsals or during them. I’d never encountered any of them before this disc. They are slight. They are also unmistakably his, that same harmonic wit, the blue-note wink, present even in miniature. Discovering unfamiliar Gershwin at this stage of a listening life is a small, genuine pleasure, and not one I expected going in.

The engineering, from MDG, is the usual German-audiophile clarity. You hear the hammer action, occasionally the pedal, in a way some listeners will find almost too intimate. It suits Simon’s pianism, which has nothing to hide.

Not everything lands. Novelette in Fourths feels a touch four-square, its harmonic experiment undersold rather than illuminated. And listeners wanting the barnstorming, jazz-inflected wildness of a Wild or a Bolcom will find Simon’s temperament fundamentally cooler, more considered. But that coolness is the point, and the achievement. This is Gershwin played by someone who trusts the material to be interesting without help. No need to gild rhythms that already dance on their own. A genuine find, and one of the more thoughtful Gershwin piano discs to come along in years.