Master Gatsby

In 1924 there occurred an extraordinary coincidence: George Gershwin composed his Rhapsody in Blue and F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote his third novel The Great Gatsby. Gershwin’s score was bright, tuneful and optimistic. Fitzgerald’s novel was brilliant, funny and sad. Both defined the 1920’s as what Fitzgerald dubbed “The Jazz Age”. I knew and loved both book and music from a very early age. I had an opportunity to express this when in 2019 the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre commissioned a new score for a ballet based on the novel. I wanted this ballet to sound like an expensive Broadway musical of the period: a small group of strings but plenty of saxes, pinging brass and holding it together that jazz beat and the throb of the Blues, but I also had a story to tell and characters to delineate.

This program represents American orchestral music in all of its verve and expressive variety. Following the sensational success of Rhapsody in Blue, Gershwin’s Concerto in F was his first foray away from jazz bands into the concert hall, recorded here for the first time in a new critical edition by Timothy Freeze based on the composer’s own notation and performances. John Harbison’s Remembering Gatsby is a foxtrot that evokes the sonorities of 1920s dance bands, while Joan Tower’s Sequoia reflects her fascination with these silent giants of the tree world. Walter Piston’s contribution to the development of 20th-century American music cannot be underestimated, and his Fifth Symphony successfully blends twelve-tone modernity with reflective profundity and a finale that evokes a spirit of joy and optimism.

Experience the iconic music from movies and series such as Babylon Berlin, The Great Gatsby and Burlesque with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, Danish Radio Big Band and guests.The Babylon Hotel is the concert where the upper class meets the underworld in a melting pot of euphoria and extravagance, nostalgia and pleasure with a carefree sinfulness only seen in the exuberant nightlife of the 1920s around the world. This concert evening takes you through the fictional Babylon Hotel, where the doors are opened to a world of music from movies like The Great Gatsby, Babylon, Burlesque, the TV series House of Dreams and Babylon Berlin and the operas Porgy and Bess and Mahagonny - and much more.