The word ``crossover'' is usually a warning of incoming schlock. Plácido Domingo sings John Denver! Itzhak Perlman saws his way through jazz! Linda Ronstadt whimpers through Gilbert and Sullivan! Rare is the musician who is adept at more than one musical style. And a raremusician was George Gershwin, America's finest crossover composer.
Gershwin first made his name in Tin Pan Alley, the district of New York City where most of the popular songwriters and publishers worked. Gershwin published his first pop song in 1916, and his first musical was staged three years later. When he was 19 he wrote the song ``Swanee,'' which eventually sold more than a million copies in sheet music and more than 2 million 78-rpm records.
He was a brilliant popular composer, whose songs were full of ingenious melodies. His use of 1920s jazz style was sophisticated, never a crass white man's rip-off. The songs also boasted witty, intelligent lyrics by Gershwin's brother Ira.
From 1922 to 1933 Gershwin turned out one or two musicals each year, almost every one containing a hit song. Among his most famous shows, at least thanks to their big songs, are ``Lady Be Good,'' ``Oh Kay!,'' ``Strike Up the Band'' and the first musical to win a Pulitzer Prize, the political satire ``Of Thee I Sing.''
Despite his popular success, Gershwin wanted to establish himself as a composer of concert music. He spent much of his short life agonizing over how to master classical techniques.
He took private lessons in harmony, counterpoint and other technical areas from the leading New York teachers of the day. But what Gershwin already had going for him couldn't be taught - a natural talent for melody and rhythm.
Unfortunately, big tunes were on their way out of classical music in the 1920s and '30s. Music was getting rougher, freer, more dissonant, less hummable.
Not only was Gershwin's music melodious and tonally conservative, but it also was sentimental and funny and a little ornery, straight off the Broadway stage. Snooty concertgoers and critics regarded his concert works as pops material at best, certainly not fit for programs devoted to Beethoven and Bartók.
The crossover nature of Gershwin's music is what kept it out of the concert hall (except for pops concerts) for decades, and made some people who love Beethoven feel a little guilty for loving Gershwin, too.
Ironically, some of Gershwin's biggest fans were the composers whose names were invoked as his superiors. There's a famous story, possibly even true, that when Gershwin asked Maurice Ravel for lessons, the famed French Impressionist replied, "Why would you want to risk being a second-rate Ravel when you are already a first-rate Gershwin?"
And after 12-tone music pioneer Amold Schoenberg gave Gershwin a few lessons, he compared their incomes and suggested that Gershwin should be giving him lessons.
The first thing you notice about Gershwin's "classical" music is the rhythm. Like most jazz and popular composers of his time, Gershwin relied heavily on a technique called syncopation. That means that the music's accents fall on weak beats instead of strong ones. Say you've got a piece of music with four beats to the measure - you keep the rhythm by counting ONE-two-three-four, ONE-two-three-four. The first beat is naturally the strongest, and maybe the third beat is fairly pronounced, too. But the second and fourth beats are weak.
Syncopation would put the main accent on the normally weak second beat, or maybe the fourth: one-TWO-three-four. Repeat this for several measures and the music starts to swing - the rhythm wakes you up if the accent regularly falls someplace it shouldn't.
Now, syncopation was nothing new. It was a favorite technique of Brahms, and even Haydn and Mozart made good use of it in the late 18th century. But for those longhair composers, syncopation was a special effect.
For Gershwin and jazz-age songwriters, it was a way of life.
In fact, jazz wasn't all that different from classical music. Each style had its own formulas, its own structures and its own typical harmonies; it's just that the colors were different, and jazz pieces tended to burn themselves out after a few minutes while many classical pieces were designed to unfold over longer time spans.
All Gershwin did was find the elements jazz-pop and classical music had in common, and emphasize them with a fitty Broadway flair.
Gershwin's first important classical composition was his 1920 ``Lullaby'' for string quartet, a quiet, lyrical but syncopated 10-minute work. In 1924 came what would become his greatest classical hit, the raffish ``Rhapsody in Blue'' for piano and orchestra. With jazzy tunes and Lisztian flourishes, ``Rhapsody in Blue'' is the most successful classical-jazz fusion music ever written.
It was introduced at a concert by popular bandleader Paul Whiteman, with a tight jazz band orchestration.
Soon it was expanded for piano and full symphony orchestra by Ferde Grofé, composer of the popular ``Grand Canyon Suite.'' That's the version usually played now, although the original, crisper, jazzier scoring, also by Grofé, is starting to crop up more frequently in concerts and recordings.
Gershwin wrote another rhapsody for piano and orchestra, called simply ``Second Rhapsody,'' but it never caught on. Interestingly, the standard orchestration of this work was done long ago by retired University of Arizona composer Robert McBride, who still lives in Tucson.
One of Gershwin's straightest compositions is his Piano Concerto in F, a 35-minute work following the same format used 150 years before by Mozart and splattered with a lot of the showoff pianistic technique used 75 years before by Liszt. It's also full of good tunes, haunting blues harmonies and jazzy rhythms - the first movement is based on the Charleston. This is a combination only Gershwin could produce.
Gershwin wrote very little for orchestra without soloist, but in 1928 he completed a lively symphonic poem called ``An American in Paris.'' The title is self-explanatory; the 20-minute piece is programmatic, meaning that it follows a story and occasionally imitates non-musical sounds. The instrumentation of ``An American in Paris'' includes authentic French taxi horns.
The piece has been popular since its premiere by the New York Philharmonic, but got a real boost when Gene Kelly choreographed it for a film of the same name in 1951. The movie's entire soundtrack, in fact, was a compilation of Gershwin hits.
Gershwin was a master of the Broadway stage, but he aspired to write a grand opera. The result was ``Porgy and Bess,'' a 1935 work in a rather folkish style for an all-black cast.
``Porgy and Bess'' has always been hard to peg. For years, opera snobs insisted that it was a musical, because it has the sound of folk and popular music even though it's put together in standard grand opera format - a series of solo arias, choruses and ensemble pieces linked with continuous music, without pauses for dialogue. No Broadway musical had ever sounded like this.
By the 1950s ``Porgy and Bess'' had become less of a curiosity, and touring companies of black singers had great success with the work in the Unites States and Europe. It was the first opera by a native American to be performed at La Scala in Milan, home office of the great 19th-century Italian operas.
In the 1970s, ``Porgy'' penetrated opera houses in Cleveland and Houston, and finally, in 1985, the haughty Metropolitan Opera deigned to produce it - the first American work it had done in years.
``Porgy and Bess'' makes the rounds of the nation's orchestras in the form of two suites - a compilation by Robert Russell Bennett of the opera's most famous tunes, and a longer suite containing the hits and some more serious material. Gershwin prepared this suite himself, and it now circulates under the title ``Catfish Row,'' after the section of Charleston where the opera is set.
Gershwin listening suggestions
``Porgy and Bess'' has been recorded complete a few times, but the performances aren't quite satisfactory. They employ excellent opera singers, whose precise enunciation is at odds with the black dialect of the libretto.
Sometimes, too, their powerful, voluptuous voices nearly overwhelm the arias. ``Porgy'' requires singers with operatic ability but Broadway finesse. Such vocalists are hard to find.
The most popular excerpts were recorded in the 1950s by Leontyne Price, William Warfield and other fine vocalists who were touring the work at the time. It has remained a favorite of Gershwin fans for more than 30 years, and is still available on a midprice RCA compact disc.
Almost all Gershwin's other classical music can be found on two CDs, each with Leonard Slatkin conducting the St. Louis Symphony. A disc on the Angel label contains ``Catfish Row,'' ``An American in Paris,'' the ``Lullaby'' and the Latin-flavored ``Cuban Overture.''
A Vox Cum Laude disc might still be around, with Jeffrey Siegel joining the orchestra in the Piano Concerto in F and the two rhapsodies.
Otherwise, there's a fairly decent version of the concerto and ``Rhapsody in Blue'' in the original orchestration on Telarc, and a spirited version of the two rhapsodies and some Gershwin oddities with Michael Tilson Thomas soloing with and conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic on CBS/Sony.