The programme Rhapsody in Jazz… combines two concert compositions by George Gershwin and Sergei Rachmaninoff performed by pianist Sergei Dorensky.
An offspring of Russian immigrants, Gershwin plunged into the whirl of American music life, dance rhythms, blues songs, musicals and revues since an early age. The composer interpreted his Rhapsody in Blue composed by an unexpected commission as “a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep.” It still remains one of his most popular compositions.
Rachmaninoff began his intensive concert career in the United States, a country he had chosen to be his second home, in the same years. He returned to his composing only a few years later. Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini finished in 1934, became his most famous work of the American period.
The two works created in America by the composers with Russian roots gain an unexpected likeness when they are played by the remarkable pianist Sergei Dorensky, whose teaching talent has given the listeners many stars of a new generation of pianists such as Nikolai Lugansky and Denis Matsuev. Gershwin's lyrical and sonorous climax waves find an obvious influence of his senior Russian colleague, while one cannot help but hear the echoes of the “vast melting pot” of American music with its undivided domination of jazz in the improvisational freedom, breathtaking dynamics, figurative and timbre-register contrasts of Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody.
Sergei Dorensky is accompanied by the State Symphony Orchestra of the USSR Ministry of Culture conducted by Alexander Dmitriev.
