Jazz, Metamorphosis, and a Boléro

About the Work

The Concerto in F is George Gershwin’s most ambitious purely orchestral statement, and a deliberate answer to the question raised by his sudden fame. In February 1924 Rhapsody in Blue had made him the most talked-about young composer in America, but that piece had been a collaboration: Gershwin wrote it for two pianos, and Ferde Grofé orchestrated it for Paul Whiteman’s band. Critics and friends wondered aloud whether Gershwin, the self-taught Tin Pan Alley songwriter, could handle the larger forms of the concert hall on his own. The conductor Walter Damrosch settled the matter by commissioning a full-scale piano concerto for the New York Symphony Society, to be played by the composer himself.

Gershwin took the challenge seriously. The story goes that, having signed the contract, he hurried to buy a book to learn exactly what a concerto was. It was a tale he liked to tell, and one that, true or not, captures his determination to do the thing properly. This time he orchestrated every note himself, mastering the apparatus of the symphony orchestra rather than handing the task to another. He worked through the summer of 1925, much of it in a rented studio, and conducted a private read-through at his own expense to hear the results before the premiere. The Concerto in F was first performed at Carnegie Hall on 3 December 1925, with Gershwin as soloist and Damrosch conducting; it has held the repertoire ever since.

The concerto follows the classical three-movement plan (fast, slow, fast) but fills that inherited frame with the sounds of 1920s America: the syncopations of jazz and ragtime, the harmonies of the blues, the brassy swagger of the dance band, all woven into a genuinely symphonic argument. Gershwin described his intentions movement by movement, speaking of the Charleston rhythm of the first movement, the ‘poetic, nocturnal atmosphere’ of the second, and the relentless drive of the finale. What makes the work more than a clever importation of popular idiom is the seriousness of its construction: themes are developed, transformed, and recalled across movements, and the writing for piano is genuinely virtuosic, demanding both the percussive attack of a jazz player and the long lyrical line of a Romantic soloist. The Concerto in F stands as the moment when Gershwin proved he could build a large concert structure entirely in his own hand, and on his own terms.

What to Listen For

The first movement opens not with the piano but with a rap of the timpani and a swinging orchestral introduction in Charleston rhythm. Listen for that dance pulse, which sets the movement’s restless energy. The piano enters with a brooding, bluesy theme, and the two ideas are tossed, combined, and built toward a grand restatement before the close.

The slow movement is the heart of the concerto and its most famous page. It opens with a smoky, nocturnal blues led by a solo muted trumpet over softly sighing woodwinds, a sound straight out of a late-night club, evoking an empty city street. When the piano enters it brings a brighter, more songful melody, and the movement alternates between that lyrical warmth and the trumpet’s bluesy melancholy. Listen for the muting on the brass, which gives the whole movement its veiled, intimate colour.

The finale erupts without pause: a fast, hammering toccata in driving rhythm, packed with the syncopations and brassy outbursts of the dance hall. Gershwin brings back themes from the earlier movements, including the trumpet blues, so that the whole concerto seems to gather and recapitulate itself, racing to a brilliant, emphatic close that brings the soloist and orchestra together in full cry.

About the Work

Métaboles is, alongside his two symphonies and the cello concerto, one of the works on which Henri Dutilleux’s reputation as a master orchestrator rests. It was commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra and its conductor George Szell to mark the orchestra’s fortieth anniversary, and the Cleveland players gave the premiere in January 1965. Dutilleux, true to his exacting nature, had laboured over the score for several years, and the result is a tautly organised, brilliantly coloured single span lasting around seventeen minutes, a piece that has become one of his most frequently performed orchestral works.

The title points directly to the music’s method. A ‘metabole’ is, in rhetoric, a figure in which the same idea is restated in transformed words; in biology, ‘metabolism’ is the process of continual change by which a living thing renews itself. Dutilleux uses the word to describe a music in which the material is constantly being transmuted: themes are not so much developed in the traditional sense as made to mutate, shifting their shape, colour, and character as they pass from one section of the orchestra to another. The work unfolds in five linked movements, played without a break, each bearing a single evocative adjective for a title: Incantatoire, Linéaire, Obsessionnel, Torpide, and Flamboyant. The five are bound together by an ingenious scheme: each movement grows out of the material of the one before, and a thematic cell is handed on from section to section, so that the whole forms a continuous chain of transformation that finally returns, in the blazing finale, to recall the very opening.

The other organising principle is orchestral colour. Each of the five movements foregrounds a different family of instruments (woodwinds, strings, brass, percussion, and finally the full ensemble) so that the piece becomes a kind of journey through the orchestra, every panel painted in its own distinct hue. This pairing of structural rigour with sensuous, ever-shifting sound is quintessential Dutilleux: a composer who built his music like a watchmaker yet made it shimmer like Debussy. Métaboles is at once a study in metamorphosis and a celebration of the modern orchestra’s capacity for colour, and it sits naturally on a programme that asks, throughout, what an orchestra can be made to sound like.

What to Listen For

The five movements run together without pause, so the most rewarding way to listen is to follow how the music changes colour and character as it passes from one to the next, and to notice that each section spotlights a different part of the orchestra.

Incantatoire opens the work with the woodwinds to the fore, weaving a hushed, ritual, spell-like music, incantatory in the literal sense, as if summoning something into being. Listen for the small thematic cell introduced here, because it will be handed on and transformed throughout.

Linéaire turns to the strings, spinning a long, sustained, singing line of great expressive warmth, the most lyrical and flowing of the five. Obsessionnel then shifts the spotlight to the brass, with an insistent, driving, repetitive figure that lives up to its name: a fixed idea hammered and circled obsessively.

Torpide (‘torpid’, sluggish) is the strange, brooding heart of the piece, dominated by percussion and dark, slow-moving sonorities: heavy, drowsy, faintly menacing. Out of this torpor bursts Flamboyant, the dazzling finale for full orchestra: fast, brilliant, and ablaze with colour, it gathers the work’s transformed material and drives it to a glittering climax, recalling the very opening before the final, incandescent close.

About the Work

Boléro is the most famous thing Maurice Ravel ever wrote, and the work he liked least to be remembered by. He composed it in 1928 not as a concert piece but as a ballet, on a commission from the dancer Ida Rubinstein, who wanted a Spanish-flavoured number for her company. Ravel, ever the meticulous craftsman, set himself a deliberately austere problem: to write a piece consisting of one idea, repeated without variation, sustained for a quarter of an hour by orchestration and a single, unbroken crescendo. He described it, with characteristic dryness, as ‘orchestral tissue without music’, an experiment in pure sound and colour rather than thematic development. To his own surprise, and somewhat to his irritation, it became the runaway popular hit of his career, played far more often than the subtler works he prized.

The structure could hardly be simpler. A single rhythmic pattern, laid down at the start by the snare drum, runs unchanged from the first bar to the last, repeated, by the end, several hundred times. Over it, two related melodic phrases (one major-ish, one with a Spanish, Moorish inflection) alternate, also without variation, passed from instrument to instrument. The harmony stays anchored, almost obsessively, on a single chord of C major. Nothing ‘happens’ in the conventional sense: there is no development, no contrast, no second subject. Everything that changes is a matter of colour and of volume: the music grows louder and more thickly scored by infinitesimal degrees, drawing in more and more of the orchestra until the whole ensemble is blazing.

This is why Boléro is, despite Ravel’s disclaimers, a supreme feat of orchestration and of nerve. The fascination lies entirely in the slow accumulation: in the way a solo flute at the opening becomes, fifteen minutes later, the full weight of the orchestra; in the daring solo turns Ravel hands to instruments rarely given the limelight (a soprano saxophone, a high E-flat clarinet); and in the extraordinary discipline required of conductor and players to hold the tempo dead steady and ration the crescendo so that there is somewhere left to go. After the relentless build, Ravel permits himself a single, electrifying coup: in the very last bars the music suddenly wrenches sideways into a foreign key (the only harmonic event in the entire piece) before crashing to its close. On a programme devoted to the colours of the orchestra, Boléro is the ultimate demonstration: an entire work conjured from rhythm, repetition, and the art of orchestration alone.

What to Listen For

Listen first for the snare drum. From the very opening it taps out the rhythmic pattern that will continue, utterly unchanged, for the whole piece, quiet at first, almost subliminal, and inexorably more present as the music grows. It is the spine of the entire work; once you hear it, you will never lose it.

Over that rhythm, follow the melody as it is handed from instrument to instrument. It begins on a solo flute, low and soft, then passes to clarinet, bassoon, and onward through the orchestra, including unusual soloists like the soprano saxophone and the high, piercing E-flat clarinet. The tune never changes; what changes is who plays it, and in what combination. Notice how Ravel adds instruments in ever-richer layers, doubling the melody in startling colours.

The single great event is the crescendo. Resist the urge to wait for a ‘theme’ to develop; there isn’t one. Instead, attend to the slow, almost imperceptible swell from near-silence to overwhelming force, and to the discipline with which the conductor holds the tempo steady so the build never lurches. Then, in the final bars, comes the one surprise Ravel allows himself: the music lurches abruptly into a new key, a sudden harmonic swerve after fifteen minutes of unwavering C major, before three hammered chords bring the whole hypnotic machine crashing to its end.