South Florida Classical Review

Shelly Berg performed Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with Gerard Schwarz conducting the Palm Beach Symphony Sunday night at the Kravis Center. Photo: IndieHouse Films

The Palm Beach Symphony’s season-opening concert Sunday felt like a pops concert from the 1970s, when such performances featured light classics rather than show tunes and movie music.

The program at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach included George Gershwin’s An American in Paris and Rhapsody in Blue, Ottorino Respighi’s Pines of Rome and Alan Hovhaness’s Prelude and Quadruple Fugue. Although the Hovhaness work may have looked out of place on a pops program, the Gershwin and Respighi pieces are some of the 20th century’s most tuneful, popular works.

At the beginning of the concert, the audience stood for the traditional performance of The Star-Spangled Banner, conducted by Mary Bryant McCourt, winner of an auction for the honor of leading the season-opening national anthem.

Gershwin’s portrait of an American’s impressions as he strolls through Paris proved an energetic opener. Conducted by music director Gerard Schwarz, the first part of the work was raucous and informal, with energetic bursts of wind and brass that conveyed the overwhelming impression of big-city life on the American visitor. The famous blues theme received a richly idiomatic trumpet solo by Gabriel Gutierrez, full of nostalgia and tonal warmth. When the strings took up the theme, however, they seemed thin and underpowered.

The piano soloist in Rhapsody in Blue was a familiar face in South Florida music circles, Shelly Berg, outgoing dean of the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music. Berg’s career, like Gershwin’s, has encompassed jazz, classical and popular music.

Berg played his part with style and verve, bringing to the solo part a jazzy ease that showed he didn’t treat it like just another piano concerto. What was most distinctive about this performance were the extended cadenzas Berg composed, or improvised, or both. (Improvising on Rhapsody in Blue is nothing new—Gershwin supposedly did it at the work’s premiere before he got around to writing down all the notes.)

Berg’s extended cadenzas may not have been entirely within the character of the work, as they used harmonies that sounded jazzier and more modern than Gershwin’s composition. But Rhapsody in Blue turned 100 last year, and Berg’s additions gave the piece a youthful, contemporary tone that this quintessentially modern work may have lost as it joined the symphonies of Beethoven and Brahms as an orchestral classic.

As an encore, he played an arrangement of Gershwin’s song “Someone to Watch Over Me,” heavily ornamented with jazzy riffs.

The 20th-century American composer Alan Hovhaness was immensely productive, churning out symphonies, concertos and choral works with the beaver-like industriousness of a Baroque or Classical composer.

His Prelude and Quadruple Fugue is one of his more popular and accessible works, with its short duration and powerful dramatic arc. Schwarz, long a champion of Hovhaness’s music, led a stark and energetic performance, from the somber opening viola melody through its abrupt ending. The heart of the work is a long fugue—marked in this performance by assertive entrances by different orchestra sections, precision in the intricate counterpoint, and a long and dramatic crescendo, with effectively frenetic string playing in the climactic final moments.

The best performance by the orchestra came in The Pines of Rome, which had been given its world premiere in 1924, the same year as Rhapsody in Blue.

Respighi’s portrait of his nation’s ancient capital opens with a portrayal of children playing, with a nursery-rhyme like melody played by the orchestra with the blaring insistence of children.

In the second section, a portrait of the catacombs, the orchestra played the chant-like music with understated power and weight. After the sounds of playing children and grim catacombs, the third movement portrait of Rome in the moonlight came off as particularly warm and sensuous, with strings giving a luxuriant account of the lush melody.

Schwarz and the orchestra left nothing understated in the final movement, a portrait of a Roman legion marching on the Appian Way. With trumpets deployed on one end of the stage and trombones and horns on the other, the orchestra gave a vivid impression of the swaggering legion getting closer and closer, dominated by brass but with the rest of the orchestra audible and contributing to an impression of overpowering grandeur.

One sour note: The Kravis Center has eliminated free parking, a beloved feature of this easy-in-easy-out venue. Patrons parking in the main garage are now required to pay for the privilege.

The Palm Beach Symphony’s next concert will take place 7:30 p.m. Dec. 16 at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach. The program includes Rimsky-Korsakov’s Snow Maiden Suite, Gabriela Lena Frank’s Elegía Andina, de Falla’s Three Cornered Hat and Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with pianist Misha Dichter. palmbeachsymphony.org 

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