It’s one of the great openings in music. The morning after the night before, a clarinet is tipped out of a club and on to a deserted New York street. Donning its fedora, the clarinet throws its coat over its arm and makes its way down the sidewalk, whistling a bluesy tune, hungover but happy.
The piece is Rhapsody in Blue, George Gershwin’s is-it-jazz-or-classical work for piano and orchestra, which the NZSO with Australian pianist Simon Tedeschi will play in Wellington and Auckland in coming weeks.
Tedeschi knows the piece inside out. He’s performed it numerous times and has recorded a pair of albums dedicated to the composer’s music. So, Rhapsody in Blue, which is it – jazz or classical?
“I tend to call Gershwin American classical music,” Tedeschi says. “He uses the language of the blues, as did Dvořák, Ravel and Stravinsky and so many others, but being an American, he imbued it with something you can only really have as an American: that sense of energy and forward movement and, I suppose, that step and spring and aggression, and that sense of rampant individualism.”
It’s also music on the cusp of joy and melancholy, the clarinet’s after-party comedown. “Certainly, and that’s something you can hear both in the African-American and Jewish traditions. In klezmer, it’s often the flattened second sound. With the blues, it’s the minor and major at the same time. So, here we have the music of the descendant of Russian Ashkenazi Jews, extemporising on the music of African America.”
Tedeschi does a lot of his own extemporising. He’s a big jazz fan, and improvisation comes naturally.
“To warm up at a concert, I’ll often start with an improvisation just to clean out the ears if nothing else. I often do it for relaxation. People assume I play classical music to relax; that hasn’t been the case since about 1987.”
Tedeschi is being droll, but he may also be hinting at why he has lately turned his hand to writing. He says Fugitives, his critically praised book of prose poetry, is difficult to explain.
“It incorporates aspects of history, philosophy, music, my own life, the Holocaust and a lot about art.”
The “formal conceit”, as Tedeschi calls it, is that his book borrows the structure of Prokofiev’s set of piano miniatures, Visions Fugitives.
“Like Rhapsody in Blue, Visions Fugitives has played an enormous role in my life. But like a lot of works of genius, it shadows the experience of the world we live in today, which is so fragmented, where concentration is pulverised by technology. There’s something about these works that speaks to our present condition and speaks to my own life. Like Gershwin, it’s 100 years old but still resonant.”
NZSO with Simon Tedeschi, Marsalis: Blues Symphony, Wellington, July 29; Auckland, August 5.
