November 12, 2021
“Homage to the Blues”
Candler Concert Series
Emerson Concert Hall, Schwartz Center for Performing Arts
Emory University, Atlanta, GA
Geneva Lewis, violin; Chenny Q, Gan, piano
David N. BAKER: Blues (Deliver My Soul)
William Grant STILL: Lenox Avenue: The Blues
Claude DEBUSSY: Violin Sonata
George GERSHWIN/arr. Heifetz: Porgy and Bess Suite
Maurice RAVEL: Violin Sonata in G major, M 77
Mark Gresham | 15 NOV 2021
On Friday evening at the Schwartz Center for Performing Arts, violinist Geneva Lewis, with collaborative pianist Chenny Gan, presented a program entitled “Homage to the Blues,” exploring some of the relationships between American and French expressions of that musical idiom.
Leis and Gan opened the program with a pair of works by American-American composers. First, Davin N. Baker’s Blues (DeliverMy Soul), followed by Lenox Avenue: The Blues by William Grant Still.
David Nathaniel Baker Jr. (1931 – 2016) was an American jazz composer, conductor, and musician from Indianapolis and a professor of jazz studies at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music who is best known as the founder of its jazz studies program.
Baker developed Deliver My Soul from his Psalm 22 for chorus, creating a sort of gospel-blues hybrid for violin and piano. Opening with a cadenza, Bake introduces a gospel-tinged melody that grows in ecstatic fervor to a full-fledged shout before reprising the theme and adding a bluesy coda.
Lenox Avenue (1937) is a musical panorama of William Grant Still’s experiences of 1930’s Harlem, New York City, in 10 scenes plus a finale. CBS radio commissioned the work for orchestra, chorus, and announcer for radio broadcast. The composer later developed it for the dance stage. “The Blues” is an excerpt drawn from one of the scenes arranged for violin and piano by Still’s friend, the American violinist Louis Kaufmann.
Born in Aukland, New Zealand, the 23-year-old Kiwi-American Lewis demonstrated a fluid, almost vocally-inflected style that feels spontaneous even though not improvised.
Pianist Chenny Q. Gan (source: Wesleyan University)
Gan was not heavy-handed with the elements of blues piano, delightfully allowing the stylistic elements speak for themselves rather than forcing them.
The concert demonstrated the two musicians make for an excellent artistic pairing.
Lewis and Gan then turned to early 20th-century blues-influenced Euro-American repertoire for the rest of the program: Violin Sonatas of Debussy and Ravel, and a suite drawn from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess arranged by Jascha Heifetz.
Notable for its brevity, Claude Debussy’s Sonata for Violin and Piano in G minor, L. 140 (1917), was the composer’s last major composition. The premiere of the 13-minute sonata took place on May 5, 1917, as part of a benefit concert for French soldiers during World War I, with Debussy himself at the piano — his last public performance.
Almost six months after Debussy premiered his Violin Sonata, 16-year-old violin prodigy Jascha Heifetz played for the first time in the United States, at Carnegie Hall in New York, and became an immediate sensation. He and his family had left Russia that year for the United States, taking an eastward route by rail to the Russian Pacific, where they boarded a ship to San Francisco.
Heifetz was born on February 2, 1901, in Vilnius, Lithuania, at the time a part of the Russian Empire. Around that time, in the United States, reports about blues music were beginning to emerge out of the Deep South, even though the Blues itself began to evolve much earlier, not long after the Civil War. The time frame more or less jived with recollections of Jelly Roll Morton, Ma Rainey, and W.C. Handy, who all remembered first hearing the Blues around 1902-1903.
By the time Heifetz arrived in the United States, the genre was in full swing and had, along with ragtime and jazz, reached as far as France and the ears of Debussy. In America, Heifetz had it in well his ears by the time he met American composer George Gershwin, who was only a little over two years his senior.
Heifetz had wanted Gershwin to write him a violin concerto, but that never came to pass. But after Gershwin’s death in July 1937, Heifetz would come to arrange a suite of songs from the composer’s 1935 folk-opera, Porgy and Bess.
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) died only five months after Gershwin. When Ravel lived in Montfort-l’Amaury, France, he accompanied classical violinist Hélène Jourdan-Morhange. They shared a love for jazz, and Ravel dedicated his Violin Sonata in G major, M 77 to her. At the time (1923-1927), the St. Louis blues style was exemplified in Paris by W. C. Handy and his band, which inspired Ravel. One can observe jazz and blues elements in the Violin Sonata, particularly the blues in the second movement.
Not all that surprisingly, this program’s repertoire is not all that far off in musical kinship, having more points of cross-connectivity than not. Lewis and Gan’s performance, frankly, reinforces that notion. The topic of French keyboard music in 18th-century New Orleans can wait for another day, but I think it relevant.
The two musicians played one of William Bolcom’s “ghost rags” as an encore, Graceful Ghost, arranged by the composer for violin and piano. And here is the only place where I have an issue with the performers: the use of the “jazz shuffle” (changing straight eighth note rhythms to loping triplets) in Bolcom’s ragtime revival pieces is more cute than graceful. I think playing “just off square” instead would have given this slow rag just the right degree of notes inégales that it deserved. ■
External links:
- The artist website of violinist Geneva Lewis
- The Wesleyan College website of pianist Chenny Q. Gan
Mark Gresham is publisher and principal writer of EarRelevant. he began writing as a music journalist over 30 years ago, but has been a composer of music much longer than that. He was the winner of an ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award for music journalism in 2003.
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