Concerto in F for Piano and Orchestra

Program notes

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.