Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue – Falletta

There used to be a species of Gershwin performance you could count on to sound like it had just come off a bender the night before — dishevelled tie, lipstick on the collar, still grinning. JoAnn Falletta’s new Buffalo disc has had a good night’s sleep, eight glasses of water, and a kale smoothie. It shows up on time. It hits every mark. I found myself, more than once, checking how many minutes remained.

This is a shame. Falletta has done real service to American orchestral repertoire that other conductors treat as an afterthought between the Brahms and the encores. But Rhapsody in Blue is a strange animal, half tuxedo and half speakeasy, and it needs a conductor willing to let it misbehave a little. Ferde Grofé’s full-orchestra arrangement — not the lean, wisecracking 1924 scoring for Paul Whiteman’s band, all clarinet smears and banjo-inflected winds, but the plush 1942 job for symphony orchestra — already tempts a director toward syrup. Falletta and pianist Orion Weiss don’t resist; they lean in. The result runs long, seriously long, well past what Andre Previn or Leonard Bernstein ever needed, with no proportional gain in warmth or wit to justify the added minutes. The famous opening clarinet whoop, beautifully turned, I’ll grant that, promises mischief the rest of the rendition never delivers.

Weiss is a real pianist, not a hack. His Gershwin concerto with this same team, released as the first volume in this series, had an appealing cut-glass clarity, treating the jazz elements as coloring rather than as the whole paint box. I liked it quite a lot at the time. Hearing this Rhapsody, though, I wonder if that “classical” poise was really elegance, or just caution wearing a nice suit. There’s no rubato that surprises, no hint of the stride-piano swagger Gershwin himself brought to his own 1924 piano roll. You can still hear that recording, all nervous energy and vaudeville timing, and it makes this new one sound like it’s reading from a script. Compare, too, Katia and Marielle Labèque, or better, the puckish quickness of Ivan Davis under Lorin Maazel. Night and day.

The rest of the program doesn’t quite rescue things. Strike Up the Band gets a snappy, serviceable run-through in Don Rose’s arrangement, brass crisp, tempos brisk — fine, forgettable, over before you’ve settled in. The rediscovered Promenade, Gershwin’s charming trifle written for the Fred Astaire film Shall We Dance, sometimes called “Walking the Dog,” gets a genial spin from clarinetist John Fullam, who also handles the famous opening glissando in the Rhapsody with real flair. He’s the most purely enjoyable soloist on the disc.

Then there’s Catfish Row, Gershwin’s own concert suite drawn from Porgy and Bess, and here the disappointment deepens. This new edition, revised by Steven Bowen, arrives without much explanation in the booklet notes of how it differs from the old Frank Campbell-Watson text that Robert Russell Bennett listeners and James Levine’s superb Chicago Symphony recording relied on for decades. Provenance aside, what matters is the playing, and the playing here is careful to a fault. The hurricane scene, which should feel like the roof coming off the house, stays politely indoors. There are lovely things: a trombone solo with real bloom and sostenuto warmth, some alert bassoon work buried in the texture, brass chords that land cleanly. But ensemble-wide there’s an earthbound quality, an unwillingness to let the syncopations bite or the tempos surge. Levine’s Chicago account — infinitely more dangerous, more voluptuous, more alive to the opera’s Charleston roots — makes this new one sound like a rehearsal run.

None of this is a scandal. Falletta conducts with obvious sympathy and technical control; the Buffalo players sound well prepared and often beautifully blended. But sympathy and preparation aren’t the same as swing, and Gershwin — jazz-besotted, Tin Pan Alley-trained, forever sneaking uptown to hear Fats Waller — wrote music that dies without a pulse under it. This disc, for all its polish, never quite finds one. File it as a disappointment after a genuinely promising start to the series, and reach instead for Levine, or for the irresistible verve of the old Michael Tilson Thomas album with the composer’s own piano roll dubbed in, if you want to remember why this music once sounded dangerous.