Béla Fleck surprised the Blossom Music Center crowd Saturday night, July 6, by how well he adapted the solo piano part for the banjo in his transcription of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with the Cleveland Orchestra.
Blossom Music Center will include classical performances, movie nights, Leslie Odom Jr. and many others for its 2024 summer season.on Saturday evening July 6, Béla Fleck surprised the Blossom Music Center crowd not so much by the level of his playing — virtuosic as always — but by how well he adapted the solo piano part for the banjo in his transcription of George Gershwin’sHis reworkings succeeded so well that the piece seemed not just suitable for the banjo but actually conceived for it.
For a recent album, Fleck recorded two other arrangements of Gershwin’s now 100-year-old Rhapsody in addition to this standard one — one in the style of bluegrass and one in a blues idiom, which explains his occasional bending or sliding of notes, and the unaccompanied cadenzas that veered delightfully toward the southern banjo tradition. The audience applauded these delightedly on Saturday.
Mitchell opened the program with Leonard Bernstein’s Three Dance Episodes from On The Town, a 1944 musical about a trio of sailors getting to spend a day of shore leave in New York City. Although pit and jazz bands have the edge over classical orchestras when it comes to Broadway jazz, The Clevelanders managed to loosen up in spite of their habits of exactitude.
In William Grant Still’s 1931 Symphony No. 1 “Afro-American,” blues both opens and permeates the work, calling to mind George Gershwin but without the heat .
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