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A MONTH before
the 90th
anniversary of the premiere of Rhapsody in Blue, Gershwin’s landmark
composition will see another first, this time the public debut of
Birmingham Royal Ballet’s Ruth Brill as a choreographer. Brill, 25, is an artist and, for those unsure of
the ballet pecking order, at the top of the tree are the Principals,
followed by First Soloists then Soloists, then First Artists then
Artists, a structure which adds a certain piquancy to the exercise. Not that Kent-born Brill is not up for the challenge. She joined BRB from English National Ballet in 2012 with several awards already under her tutu including National Youth Ballet bronze statuette (2006), Barbara Geoghegan Award (2007), Cecchetti International Ballet Competition (2008) and Cecchetti International Gala (2011). And as well as dancing she is also fascinated by the process of dance creation, choreography, turning music into movement, an interest which found early expression when she won the choreography cup while studying for A-level dance at the Arts Educational School in Tring in Hertfordshire. So whenever the opportunity arose for
choreography she
took it, creating Hit on all Sixes for a BRB choreographic
workshop last year with music from the film The Artist put
together by “my techie dad” Michael. She also created Butterfly Effect for
Elmhurst School for Dance last year, but it was her eight-minute workshop
piece,
“It was probably that that planted the seed in his mind. When they were discussing what to do at Symphony Hall the story goes that Paul Murphy, the conductor, said the orchestra would very much like to play Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and obviously because David was going to be focussing on Prince of the Pagodas there was no way he would have time to choreograph anything like that. Hit on All Sixes; Laura Davenport, Laura Day and Reina Fuchigami. Pictures: Roy Smiljanic "Apparently my name was put forward and I
was asked in the summer if I was up for choreographing the piece, which
was good as it meant I had a long time to listen to the music and to get ideas. “I always wanted to take the opportunity so I
grabbed it with both hands and I have been listening to that track on
repeat ever since and there is just so much in it that I have never been
dry for inspiration” So Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, as well as
being her longest piece, will also be the first in public, before a
paying audience, with the full Royal Ballet Sinfonia, under principal
conductor Paul Murphy – oh and she has been asked to create the piece by
BRB director and internationally acclaimed choreographer David Bintley –
so no pressure then. “I have done outreach things and little pieces
for youth ballet companies and such, but this is very different and there
is so much more scope when you are choreographing company dancers who
can really move and do pretty much anything you ask, up to a point; so
this is the biggest opportunity so far, but I am really excited and
it is great fun.” As a member of the corps de ballet, albeit an
experienced and established one, Brill had to deal with dancers higher
up the ballet food chain but she said: “The reaction has been really
nice. I spoke to David at the beginning and gave him a wishlist of
dancers I thought would suit this piece and that is who I have ended up working with. I don’t want to be
bossing them around, particularly if it is someone more senior to you. “It has certainly been a learning experience but
I just want to get it right. The relationship with the dancers is so
important, particularly when you are asking them to come to rehearsals
in the middle of a Nutcracker run and everyone else
comes in at three in the afternoon and you ask your dancers to come in
at 11. “I hope I have got that balance, but at the end of
the day you are telling them what to do and you want to get what you
want out of them but I very much want their input if there is something
that does not feel right or doesn’t quite “I want them to be having a ball up there rather than struggling with the choreography because that obviously comes across to the audience.
“It has been great fun and I have worked with very
responsive dancers who have been great even though they were all
exhausted from Nutcracker.” Brill is full of praise for BRB and its
repertoire, which encourages new music, new pieces and new choreography
all helping ballet to evolve. “David is really pushing for new work and there
really are a lot of opportunities.” And this new work . . . “My personal approach is that I have listened and
listened and listened to the music. The purpose of the piece is for an
evening of music and dance, it is about the music and the dancing, it is
the orchestra and the dances together. “I am going to have moments in it when there is
no dancing, just the audience listening to the music.
It is so amazing there are certain moments we feel we can’t even match
with dance “Also because of the timescale and
working around Nutcracker and then a big Christmas break in the
middle I wanted to be really productive with the time I have had in the
studio so I have broken it up into various sections in my head and come
in to most rehearsals with clear ideas of what I want to do with each
section mapped out in my mind. “You need to know what you want when you come
into the room because you are the one creating the whole thing. It is
your chance to show the audience what you have
created.” And in the midst of the creative process there is
an extraordinary link between Ruth Brill in 2014 and George Gershwin in
1924, the same piece but 90 years apart. Gershwin was to tell his official biographer
Isaac Goldberg in 1931 that he had heard and formulated the whole
construction of Rhapsody in Blue on a train journey from New York
to Boston. Brill, working on the piece on her day off, said:
“I have random moments of inspiration. I find on the train I often have
a lot of clear ideas; I suppose it is just time when I am sitting there
with my notebook and my music for a good chunk of time if I am going
down to London or to see my parents in Kent.”
At 25 Brill sees a few more dancing years ahead
of her but accepts dancing is not the longest of careers so is keeping
all her options open including more choreography where she says with a
laugh “I like being in charge”. “As a dancer you put your own slight
interpretation on it, dance in your own way, but you are being told
exactly what to do and when you have to do it; you have to be very good at accepting
that. You have to do exactly what you are told and it has been really
rather nice to have my own voice. I have really enjoyed being on the
other side so perhaps that is an avenue I will really have to start
thinking about.” It all could have ben so different though. Brill
never set out to be a ballerina as a tot in a tutu. “My parents sent me
off to ballet class because I had so much energy and they needed
something for me to do and I just loved it. It didn’t go off to full
time dance school until I was 15 or 16. “It was all after school and at weekends but at
10 or 11 I was winning various things and people were saying ‘she has
lots of potential’ but I was not ready to go away from home. It was 11
when I really wanted to go for it but the real crunch time was at 15. “Did I stay on at school and do my A levels or
did I go
for it.” She went for it and the rest is history and the
future, for now, is blue. Roger Clarke An Evening of Music and Dance at Symphony Hall
is on Friday, January 17 with the Royal Ballet Sinfonia conducted by
Paul Murphy. Rhapsody in Blue
with principal pianist Jonathan Higgins will be danced by soloist Samara
Downs and first artist William Bracewell with five male and five female
dancers in a programme that also includes
Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March No.5,
a pas de deux
from David Bintley's Beauty and the
Beast, a guest appearance from students
of Elmhurst School for Dance, performing a piece especially created for
them, Berlioz's Carnival Romain, and the beautiful
Diana and Actaeon pas de deux
THE clarinet glissando which opens George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue
is among the most famous and familiar openings in music, as well known
as Beethoven’s Fifth, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, the theme
from Phantom or Jaws, operatic arias, pop classics or ballet favourites. Yet it was an accident, a joke played on Gershwin in rehearsals by
Ross Gorman, the star clarinetist in Paul Whiteman’s orchestra who
changed the opening 17 note scale into a glissando. The
joke raised more than a laugh, it created a legend. Gershwin heard it,
loved it and incorporated it into the premier a few days later. Whiteman, known as the King of Jazz, was the most popular dance band leader of the 1920s and had commissioned the piece from Gershwin. He had held an experimental classical-jazz concert i
Whiteman was the son of an opera singer mother and a father who was
head of schools music in Denver; he played viola in first the Denver
Symphony Orchestra then the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra before
conducting a US Navy band at the end of the First World War. Gershwin was also classically trained and had had some success in Tin
Pan Alley with his first big hit Swanee in 1919 and had found success
with brother Ira on Broadway. George, who died of a brain tumour aged
just 38, was only 24 when Whiteman approached him on 1 November 1923 –
and he turned him down because he thought there would not be the time to write the
piece. He was finally persuaded though and started work on 7 January, 1924
with the concert set for 12 February Gershwin told biographer
Isaac Goldberg that he heard the complete construction for Rhapsody in
the rhythm of a the train on a journey to Boston. Rather than a concerto, with separate movements, Gershwin wrote a
rhapsody with one extended movement. It was originally envisaged as a
piece for two pianos but was orchestrated by Whiteman’s arranger and
pianist Ferde Grofé. The orchestration was completed with just
eight days to go and was the penultimate piece of 26 in Whiteman’s
concert, An Experiment in Modern Music. Gershwin was on piano and
improvised, not writing out the solo piano part until after the concert
so we know how Gershwin decided it should sound, but not what it
actually sounded like in the Premiere. Whiteman had moved away from a jazz only concert to one he hoped
would make opera and classical music more accessible to the man in the
street – the final piece, remember this was modern music, was Elgar’s
Pomp and Circumstance March No 1, written in 1901. In a pre-show talk
Whiteman had said the concert was educational, explaining the different
types of music. Rhapsody established Gershwin as a serious composer not just a
tune plugger or popular song writer which was confirmed when Grofé
scored the piece again in 1927 for a larger orchestra and then again for
a symphony orchestra which placed the piece in both jazz and classical
camps. And the piece still continues to do what Whiteman intended with his
concert, helping to introduce a wider public to the world of classical
music. Below are links to analogue recordings, made in
1924 shortly after the first performance, recorded in New Jersey on
Victor Talking Machine discs – electrical recordings using microphones
were not to be made until the following year. These were among the
last of the analogue recordings with sound directed down a horn to a wax
disc. The most likely venue was Camden where Victor had
facilities rather than the popularly stated Menlo Park, which was Thomas
Edison’s headquarters. The recordings with Gershwin on piano and Paul
Whiteman and his orchestra, are of an abridged version with the score
cut to bring a 15 minute piece down to nine minutes or so to fit on both
sides of a Victor disc. Despite that and the limitations of analogue
recording, this is said to be the closest known recording to the
original performance at the Aeolian Hall in Manhattan which was an
arrangement for Whiteman’s 24 piece orchestra and added violins. Listen carefully and you can hear the banjos used
in the original! Rather than combine the files we have left them as
they were originally, on two discs. The original files, incidentally,
are from the excellent
https://archive.org site, which is a superb
source of old recordings, films and TV progammes. We have also included, from the same site, the 1927
electrical recordings orchestrated, like the original, by Ferde Grofé,
but for a larger orchestra. Grofé was to create many more arrangements
culminating in a 1942 version for a full symphony orchestra, which was
to become the standard and best-known version. This version, again abridged to nine minutes or so
to fit on two sides also has Gershwin on piano and the original
clarinetist Ross Gorman playing the opening and iconic glissando.
Although it was the Whiteman orchestra the conductor was Nathaniel
Shilkret as Whiteman had walked out after a disagreement with Gershwin.
1927 Recording with Gershwin on Piano
English classical pianist, Jack Gibbons is
regarded as one of the best interpreters of Gershwin's music and is
renowned for his note-for-note reconstructions of Gershwin’s playing from
transcriptions and piano rolls and this is a note-for-note recreation of
Gershwin’s 4-handed 1925 piano-roll of Rhapsody in Blue, recorded live
in concert in 2007.
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seen
by BRB director David Bintley that was to become create another
opportunity.
make sense to them because, especially with this piece of music.
n New York and
had decided to go a step further and hold an all-jazz concert and asked
Gershwin to contribute a concerto style piece. 