Nov. 22--There's no mystery as to how George Gershwin's piano music ought to sound.
He recorded many of his scores, film snippets of Gershwin at the piano are readily available on YouTube, and books by pianist Oscar Levant (a Gershwin contemporary) and Edward Jablonski (Gershwin's best biographer) describe the crackle and buoyancy of Gershwin's pianism in detail.
The trouble is not only that few pianists today can capture Gershwin's keyboard wizardry but, remarkably, that so few try. More often than not, modern-day interpretations of Gershwin's piano music are too slow or rhythmically exaggerated or technically sloppy or all the above. Classical pianists frequently apply jazz affectations when playing this music, and jazz pianists of course improvise freely upon it, ingeniously taking the music new places but far from Gershwin's world.
All of which makes the work of Chicagoan Kevin Cole at once unique and indispensable, for he captures the spirit and sound of Gershwin's pianism without necessarily playing the sheet music exactly as it was written. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that he doesn't play Gershwin's scores as they were published, often with distortions, errors, cuts and other diminutions that were typical of the way American popular music was commercially disseminated in the 1920s and '30s.
Cole, who has devoted his life and career to understanding this music and the era from which it came, somehow has absorbed Gershwin's way of thinking and articulating at the piano, as he reaffirmed Friday night at PianoForte Studios on South Michigan Avenue. Playing a Fazioli grand in an intimate concert room, Cole welcomed a nearly capacity audience into the aesthetics of Gershwin's pianism, as well as its technical inner workings.
Some of Cole's most compelling and creative work emerged in his arrangements of Gershwin songs, the pianist embellishing the tunes very much as Gershwin might have done. The great composer, after all, started out as a Tin Pan Alley song plugger, inventing endless variations on tunes in hopes of peddling sheet music.
When Cole opened his recital with "I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise," he referenced Gershwin's Tin Pan Alley roots with clattering virtuosity. Where most pianists are content simply to play the melody and surround it with lush harmony, Cole articulated several themes at once across the full range of the keyboard. Fast-flying scales, speedy glissandos, sparkling arpeggios and other devices alluded to the exuberance of Gershwin's pianism, as did Cole's brisk and unstoppable tempo.
Gershwin routinely regaled listeners at parties with this ebullient brand of pianism, unreeling one glistening performance after another. This prompted pianist Levant to famously remark that, "An evening with Gershwin is a Gershwin evening."
Pianist Abram Chasins, a Gershwin contemporary, once observed that Gershwin "was the only pianist I ever heard who could make a piano laugh, really laugh." Cole did exactly that in "Fascinating Rhythm" via a crisp technique, snappy syncopations and spare use of the sustaining pedal.
Gershwin of course also flourished in classical idioms, but his opera "Porgy and Bess" isn't the only example. On a much smaller scale, Gershwin's Preludes show the composer working in a form perfected by Frederic Chopin, albeit imbued with elements of jazz. Cole was masterful in choosing tempos, moving swiftly through the first Prelude, avoiding the sentimental swooning with which lesser pianists ruin the second and turning the third into the larger-than-life showpiece it was meant to be.
And then there was the tour de force, Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," premiered in 1924 as a kind of Jazz Age piano concerto but perhaps even more gripping when dispatched by a lone pianist. To his credit, Cole restored measures that for decades were unnecessarily butchered from the published score. In Cole's hands, this long-missing music made structural sense, giving the "Rhapsody" the connective tissue and dramatic heft Gershwin intended.
That Cole also dared to play the piece up to tempo, didn't slow down for the demonically difficult passages, and conveyed the development of Gershwin's themes made this as close to a definitive "Rhapsody" as we're likely to hear at this late date.
It has taken Cole decades to get so deeply inside this music, and because of his efforts many listeners have come to realize that Gershwin's scores are not the easy-listening, lightweight American music they're often made out to be. There's so much more musical substance and sophistication to Gershwin's work, a point Cole reiterates every time he performs it.
hreich@tribpub.com
Twitter @howardreich
