Word: gershwin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...music he makes. Therein, in fact, may lie the real secret of his success: the perpetually hummable tunes of the 19th century waltz king after whom Rieu's orchestra is named. "When I want a melody/ Lilting through the house,/ Then I want a melody/ By Strauss," Ira Gershwin wrote in 1936, and six intervening decades of swing, rock and hip-hop have done nothing to diminish the truth of his words. Handsome fiddlers come and go, but Strauss, it seems, is here to stay...
...that sits atop a Las Vegas tourist bus. His music is featured even more prominently--even if he isn't--in the Julia Roberts romantic comedy My Best Friend's Wedding, providing for a younger generation the same kind of romantic charge, simultaneously nostalgic and bracingly fresh, that George Gershwin gave when he was rediscovered by the disco generation two decades ago in Woody Allen's Manhattan...
...Unlike Gershwin, Bacharach, perhaps because he worked in pop-rock and pop-soul idioms, has not been taken seriously by devotees of the Great American Songbook. But Tyner's album, along with another new CD (Great Jewish Music: Burt Bacharach) produced by avant-garde composer and klezmer enthusiast John Zorn and featuring a number of musicians with jazz leanings from New York's Downtown school, makes the case that Bacharach's melodies are worthy of being standards. Tyner says he's "shocked" that more jazz musicians haven't taken them...
Crossover is nothing new. The Viennese violinist Fritz Kreisler recorded Irving Berlin tunes in 1927, around the same time that a Tin Pan Alley refugee named George Gershwin sent wigs flying with such concert scores as An American in Paris. What has changed is that today's listeners, raised in an era of shrinking arts education, are showing less interest in the classical standards. Meanwhile, younger classical performers, themselves suckled on pop, want to play it, not only to make big bucks but also because they like it. When Jean-Yves Thibaudet, famous for his interpretations of Ravel and Rachmaninoff...
...classical music with rock 'n' roll successfully? Though elements of rock can be heard in the works of such composers as Philip Glass, no one has yet produced a truly crowd-pleasing piece that brings rock into the concert hall or opera house the same way that Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein taught symphony orchestras how to swing...