Gershwin Reimagined – Royal Festival Hall

Gershwin Reimagined at the Royal Festival Hall, London.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

Gershwin Reimagined is the ambitious concept of the conductor Troy Miller who devised this programme coupling his own arrangements of familiar Gershwin songs with the suite ‘Catfish Row’ which Gershwin based on his magnum opus, Porgy and Bess.

Dressed in full orchestral attire, rich in detail and intricately orchestrated, Miller’s arrangements were a world away from the roots of the Gershwin songbook of the 1920s and 1930s that came to define him as the master of the jazz age and a composer/songwriter of true originality.

If anything they echoed in their manner the soundtracks of many a symphonic film score and were delivered as such by the Philharmonia Orchestra with a virtuosic distinction second to none.

The ‘Lullaby for Strings’, an early Gershwin composition, was beautifully played by the Philharmonia strings impeccably led by their leader Helena Wood. In the ‘Catfish Row’ suite, the orchestra delivered these vivid and dramatic operatic sketches with a full panoply of colours, ranging from the edgy ‘Fugue’ that accompanied the murder of Crown in Act III, to picking out the rainbow hues in the wild ‘Hurricane’.

The spirits were raised by the rousing rendition of the uplifting ‘Oh, Lawd I’m On My Way’, a joyous conclusion to the official part of the programme.

But with star singers Laura Mvula and Shaun Escoffery waiting in the wings we had an encore bringing summertime to a damp February night, as the conductor put it. The scoring was a veritable feast of dancing light woven through that ecstatic lullaby, ‘Summertime’.

This, for me, was the best of the orchestral transcriptions with the singers at ease with the symphonic medium. In other treatments their vocals tended to be over parted from their surroundings as wave upon wave of orchestral sound seemed to engulf the simplicity of these tunes and the often intimate thoughts expressed in the lyrics.

The impressionistic start to ‘Foggy Day’ seemed a natural thing, but it soon foundered in a welter of colour, leaving the soloist beached somewhere on the Thames Embankment.

Woodblock snaps in ‘I Got Rhythm’ were all pervasive though it gave the conductor a chance to show off his prowess on bongos.

Mvula sang two of her own songs, but I couldn’t but help think they would have come off best with a simple, piano, bass, drums accompaniment.

An enterprising evening then but one that didn’t quite come off.

Adrian Edwards