Gershwin: Porgy and Bess - Summertime

The same year George Gershwin published the version for two pianos of his Rhapsody in Blue, the novel Porgy, by the writer DuBose Heyward, became the bestseller of that year, 1926. Gershwin was fascinated with the work, which addressed the painful life of black people of the south in the United States, and thought about writing an opera based on it, for which he initiated contacts with the author to obtain the copyright and his permission.

But other projects distracted him and it was not until eight years later, in 1934, when he began to work intensely on the music for the libretto that Heyward and George's brother lyricist, Ira Gershwin, had written on the basis of the same name play, written in duet by Heyward and his wife. At the beginning of 1935, the opera was finished and Porgy and Bess was released in September of that year. The name of the co-star was added to the original title of the novel and the play, so as to compare, favourably, with Tristan and Isolde, to give an example.

The play tells the story of Porgy, a black beggar, and a handicapped person, to make things worse, who tries to rescue Bess, young black woman, from the clutches of a possessive and violent lover.
Originally four hours long, the work is divided into three acts. In the first one, a young mother sings a lullaby, Summertime, to her little son. (In the third act, Bess will sing it). And contrary to the common opinion, his verses are not Ira Gershwin's but Heyward's.

Countless versions have been made of the theme, a large part of them for jazz groups and performed by the most famous African-American music singers, among them, to name a few, Janis Joplin, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and many others.
The original song is offered here, in a concert version, with the American soprano Kathleen Battle, accompanied by the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. Unlike other singers, Kathleen sings in the tonality, very demanding, that Gershwin set out.

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Max Bruch: Violin Concerto in G major

The German composer Max Bruch, born in Cologne, Kingdom of Prussia, in 1838, is part of the group of minor post-romantic musicians, from the second half of the European nineteenth century. It is a time when composers live a kind of forced transition in which they are forced to prolong romantic forms and aesthetics, to please an increasingly vast public formed by an enriched bourgeoisie that does not advocate sophistication.

Bruch's Violin Concerto in G minor, from 1868, is in a certain way part of that aesthetic because in the work we can still appreciate that exacerbation of pyrotechnics and virtuosity that will be later abandoned by the authors to come, putting a definite end to the great romantic century.
Max Bruch composed three violin concertos but the only one that remains to this day as part of the violinists' standard repertoire is Concert N° 1 in G minor. Composed at age 30, it enjoyed enormous acceptance for a long time, to the extent that the author seriously thought about forbidding its performing because it impeded the interpretation of the others. Apparently, the audience today and yesterday were right.

Max Bruch (1838 - 1920)

The concert score also has a story. At the end of World War I, due to the chaotic economic situation, Bruch's editor was not in the position to pay the copyright to this and other works of the composer. Bruch did not like it at all and sent the autograph score to a couple of sisters who were a famous piano duet for whom he had already composed a concerto for piano, in order that they sold the concerto in the United States. Rose and Ottilie Sutro, two pioneering girls in the country of opportunities, sold it on their own and Bruch never got a penny for the transaction. The composer died in Berlin in 1920, not knowing what happened with his popular concerto on his tour through the new world.

Violin Concerto in G major - Finale (allegro energico)
The concerto is in three movements. We offer here the last of them – the one that made the work famous – in the rendition of the extraordinary American violinist Sarah Chang, of whom Yehudi Menuhin pointed out she was "the most wonderful, the most perfect, the most ideal violinist I've heard". Sarah is the daughter of Korean parents but was born in the USA in 1980. At the age of nine, she made her debut in New York accompanied by the New York Philharmonic.

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