George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue turns 100 on 12th February.
It wasn’t Gershwin’s best work but it was an epoch-defining one. The distillation in music of ‘the youthful zeitgeist of the Jazz Age’, said Scott Fitzgerald. And he would have known. That same year, he began work on his own epoch-defining masterpiece, The Great Gatsby.
12th February, Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, wasn’t the best date for bandleader Paul Whiteman to stage his gargantuan showcase event. With 36 items to – number 35 on a programme scheduled to end with (of all things) Elgar’s March No 1.
