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An American in Paris is a jazz-influenced orchestral piece by American composer George Gershwin first performed in 1928. It was inspired by the time that Gershwin had spent in Paris and evokes the sights and energy of the French capital in the Années folles.
George Gershwin was an American composer, pianist and painter whose compositions spanned both popular and classical genres. Among his best-known works are the orchestral compositions Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and An American in Paris (1928), the songs "Swanee" (1919) and "Fascinating Rhythm" (1924), the jazz standard "I Got Rhythm" (1930), and the opera Porgy and Bess (1935), which gave birth to the hit "Summertime".
Leonard Constant Lambert was a British composer, conductor, and author. He was the Founder Music Director of the Royal Ballet, and he was a major figure in the establishment of the English ballet as a significant artistic movement. His ballet commitments, including extensive conducting work throughout his life, restricted his compositional activities. However one work, The Rio Grande, for chorus, orchestra and piano soloist, achieved widespread popularity in the 1920s, and is still regularly performed today. His other work includes a jazz influenced Piano Concerto (1931), major ballet scores such as Horoscope (1937) and a full-scale choral masque Summer's Last Will and Testament (1936) that some consider his masterpiece. Lambert had wide-ranging interests beyond music, as can be seen from his critical study Music Ho! (1934), which places music in the context of the other arts. His friends included John Maynard Keynes, Anthony Powell and the Sitwells.
Rhapsody in Blue is a 1924 musical composition by the American composer George Gershwin for solo piano and jazz band, which synthesizes elements of classical music with jazz-influenced effects. The composition was commissioned by bandleader Paul Whiteman. The piece received its premiere in the concert, "An Experiment in Modern Music," which was held on February 12, 1924, in Aeolian Hall, New York City, by Whiteman and his band with Gershwin playing the piano. The work was orchestrated by Ferde Grofé several times, including the original 1924 scoring, the 1926 "theater orchestra" setting, and the 1942 symphony orchestra scoring.
Ferdinand Rudolph von Grofé, known as Ferde Grofé was an American composer, arranger, pianist and instrumentalist. He is best known for his 1931 five-movement tone poem, Grand Canyon Suite.
The Rite of Spring is a ballet and orchestral concert work by the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. It was written for the 1913 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company; the original choreography was by Vaslav Nijinsky with stage designs and costumes by Nicholas Roerich. When first performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 29 May 1913, the avant-garde nature of the music and choreography caused a sensation. Many have called the first-night reaction a "riot" or "near-riot", though this wording did not come about until reviews of later performances in 1924, over a decade later. Although designed as a work for the stage, with specific passages accompanying characters and action, the music achieved equal if not greater recognition as a concert piece and is widely considered to be one of the most influential musical works of the 20th century.
Ballet as a music form progressed from simply a complement to dance, to a concrete compositional form that often had as much value as the dance that went along with it. The dance form, originating in France during the 17th century, began as a theatrical dance. It was not until the 19th century that ballet gained status as a “classical” form. In ballet, the terms ‘classical’ and ‘romantic’ are chronologically reversed from musical usage. Thus, the 19th century Classical period in ballet coincided with the 19th century Romantic era in music. Ballet music composers from the 17th–20th centuries, including the likes of Jean-Baptiste Lully, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Igor Stravinsky, and Sergei Prokofiev, were predominantly in France and Russia. Yet with the increased international notoriety seen in Tchaikovsky's and Stravinsky's lifetime, ballet music composition and ballet in general spread across the western world.
Blue Monday was the original name of a one-act "jazz opera" by George Gershwin, renamed 135th Street during a later production. The English libretto was written by Buddy DeSylva. Though a short piece, with a running time of between twenty and thirty minutes, Blue Monday is often considered the blueprint to many of Gershwin's later works, and is often considered to be the "first piece of symphonic jazz" in that it was the first significant attempt to fuse forms of classical music such as opera with American popular music, with the opera largely influenced by Jazz and the African-American culture of Harlem.
Catfish Row, originally titled Suite from Porgy and Bess, is an orchestral work by George Gershwin based upon music from his famous opera Porgy and Bess. Gershwin completed the work in 1936 and it premiered at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia on January 21 of that year, with Alexander Smallens conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra. Gershwin played the piano part, including the piano solo in the opening moments. This piece preserves some of the darkest and most complex music Gershwin ever wrote.
Shall We Dance, released in 1937, is the seventh of the ten Astaire-Rogers musical comedy films. The idea for the film originated in the studio's desire to exploit the successful formula created by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart with their 1936 Broadway hit On Your Toes. The musical featured an American dancer getting involved with a touring Russian ballet company. In a major coup for RKO, Pandro Berman managed to attract the Gershwins – George Gershwin who wrote the symphonic underscore and Ira Gershwin the lyrics – to score this, their second Hollywood musical after Delicious in 1931.
Cuban Overture is a symphonic overture or tone poem for orchestra composed by American composer George Gershwin. Originally titled Rumba, it was a result of a two-week holiday which Gershwin took in Havana, Cuba in February 1932. Gershwin composed the piece in July and August 1932.
The Second Rhapsody is a concert piece for orchestra with piano by American composer George Gershwin, written in 1931. It is sometimes referred to by its original title, Rhapsody in Rivets.
Variations on "I Got Rhythm" is a set of variations for orchestra and piano solo composed by George Gershwin in 1933–34. The piece is dedicated "to [his] brother Ira".
Delicious (1931) is an American pre-Code Gershwin musical romantic comedy film starring Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, directed by David Butler, with color sequences in Multicolor.
Harriet Hoctor was a ballerina, dancer, actress and instructor. Composer George Gershwin composed a symphonic orchestral piece specifically for Hoctor in the film Shall We Dance (1937).
Walking the Dog is one of many musical numbers written in 1937 by George Gershwin for the Fred Astaire – Ginger Rogers film score for Shall We Dance. In the film, the music accompanies a sequence of walking a dog on board a luxury liner. In 1960, the sequence was published as "Promenade".
The Blossom Festival is a summer music festival of orchestral music located at the Blossom Music Center in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. The festival was originally created to provide a summer concert vehicle for the Cleveland Orchestra and the Blossom Music Center was specifically built to host the festival. The festival's first season was in 1968 and it consisted of six weeks of concerts given by the Cleveland Orchestra intermingled with eight individual jazz/folk music concerts. George Szell conducted the first concert on July 19, 1968. Since then the festival has been expanded to include ten weeks of orchestral music, most of which is still performed by the Cleveland Orchestra but also includes concerts by the festival's own Blossom Festival Orchestra. The Blossom Festival Orchestra is made up of free-lance musicians from the Cleveland area, mostly pulling from musicians of the Cleveland Pops Orchestra, Opera Cleveland Orchestra, or Apollo's Fire. The orchestra performs annually for the Blossom Festival, often appearing when the Cleveland Orchestra has other summer performance engagements outside of the Cleveland area.
The Most Incredible Thing is the score for the 2011 ballet of the same name, based on the eponymous 1870 fairy tale by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen. It contains music written and performed by Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe of English synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys. The album was released on 14 March 2011 by Parlophone.
Fabio D'Andrea is a British Italian pianist, composer, songwriter and producer. He trained at King's College London under the composer George Benjamin.
References
- ↑ "The Editions » Gershwin". Music.umich.edu. Retrieved 2016-04-07.
- ↑ "Musicology Now: George and Ira Gershwin Critical Edition". Musicologynow.ams-net.org. 2013-09-17. Archived from the original on 2018-12-15. Retrieved 2016-04-07.
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