When pianist Kevin Cole joins guest conductor David Alan Miller for the Sarasota Orchestra’s first Discoveries concert of the season Oct. 5, “Gershwin’s American Dream,” audiences will hear a version of the composer’s Concerto in F that may sound a little different.
Cole, considered one of the top Gershwin interpreters, and the orchestra will be working from a new critical edition of the concerto that was prepared as part of the University of Michigan’s Gershwin Initative.
“This has been a 10-year project and will probably be going for 30 years. They are restoring all of George Gershwin’s music back to the way he originally wrote it, without editors getting their fingers in it, which so many did after he died in 1937,” Cole said.
He and Miller were the first to record this critical edition (on the Naxos label). Many may not notice a difference “but for those that know the piece, they’ll hear differences in the orchestration but everyone will still be hearing the Concerto in F.”
The piece is part of a concert that also includes “The Blues” section of Dana Suesse’s Concerto in Three Rhythms. Cole said the press at the time “dubbed her ‘the girl Gershwin,’ which she didn’t quite like, though there were some similarities. Technically, she was a superb pianist like Gershwin.” Her concerto had its premiere in 1934 in the fourth edition of An Experiment in Modern Music, led by Paul Whiteman, who had presented the premiere of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” in the first edition 10 years earlier.
The concert also will feature Michael Daugherty’s “Gold” for Orchestra from “The Adventures of Jesse Owens,” Morton Gould’s Pavanne from American Symphonette No. 2 and Viet Cuong’s “Next Week’s Trees.”
Discoveries concerts generally run about an hour and are designed to be more accessible for those who are new to classical music concerts and engaging for those who regularly attend them.
Developing a love for Gershwin
Cole started taking piano lessons when he was about 4 ½ years old, and when he was 7, his parents let him stay up late to watch the 1945 Gershwin biographical movie “Rhapsody in Blue” with Robert Alda as the composer.
“I didn’t realize that the story was made up by Hollywood, but the music was so good and it had a lot of people who worked with Gershwin – Al Jolson, Oscar Levant, the cast of ‘Porgy and Bess'. That really hit me and it gave me a real dollop of Gershwin,” he recalled.
On a visit to his local library in Bay City, Michigan, the librarian gave him a copy of “The Gershwin Years,” whose co-author Edward Jablonski also came from Bay City. During a visit to New York at age 15, Cole said he was determined to meet Jablonski and grabbed a phone book to find him.
“When I looked up Jablonski E, there was a row and a half of names. I put my finger on one and called and it was him. It was like an MGM musical,” he recalled.
The Jablonskis invited him to dinner one evening and later asked him to play. When he was finished, the author, who wrote several books about Gershwin and other composers, asked him, “Has anyone ever said when you play Gershwin you sound like Gershwin.”
Cole had never heard Gershwin perform, and Jablonski soon played him several pieces on reel to reel tapes.
“Not only did I get to hear him play but I got to hear him speak,” Cole said, adding that Jablonski told him “there was something special about the way I play.”
He spent time over several summers with the Jablonskis, meeting composers Irving Berlin and Harold Arlen, lyricist Yip Harburg, Gershwin’s sister, Frances, and composer Kay Swift, who was impressed.
“Kay Swift got up and said, ‘We haven’t heard the piano sound like that since George.’ As an 18-year-old, what do you do with that? It was like a Twilight Zone moment and it just pointed me in the direction I should go,” he said.
Navigating a piano career
He began specializing in Gershwin, but admits “it’s a tough road when you’re playing the most popular piano concertos in the world, music that 500 other piano soloists are playing. But I had something different to say. Nobody will ever sound like Gershwin or Liszt or Rachmaninoff, the big pianist-composers, but I can capture some of the same energy that George had when he played.”
The year 2024 marks the 100th anniversary of “Rhapsody in Blue” and next year is the 100th anniversary of the premiere of Concerto in F.
“To sound so fresh and connect with the audience the way they do, 100 years later, really says something about these works,” he said. “Even though there are some marvelous piano concertos, nothing has come close to the popularity of Concerto in F.”
‘Gershwin’s American Dream’
Sarasota Orchestra Discoveries. David Alan Miller, conductor, Kevin Cole, piano soloist. 7:30 p.m. Oct. 5, Sarasota Opera House, 61 N. Pineapple Ave., Sarasota. Tickets are $25-$85. 941-953-3434; sarasotaorchestra.org
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This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Pianist shares love for Gershwin in Sarasota Orchestra Discoveries concert
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