Piano Concerto in F major: I. Allegro

Gershwin at his most exuberant, his most unguardedly joyful. The opening movement of the Piano Concerto in F launches with a Charleston rhythm in the timpani — a literal dance rhythm from the jazz clubs of 1925 made structurally load-bearing in a concert work — and the piano enters with the confident swagger of someone who knows exactly how good they are and wants to show you. Where Rhapsody in Blue has a dreamlike, improvisatory quality, this concerto is more formally organized, more willing to declare its themes and develop them, and the energy is correspondingly more direct, more propulsive. The solo writing is brilliant in the old sense — full of glittering runs and octave passages and bluesy decorations that sit exactly at the intersection of conservatory training and Tin Pan Alley instinct. The orchestration is fuller than Rhapsody, more conventionally symphonic, with woodwinds and brass given real thematic material rather than merely accompaniment. But the harmonic personality is pure Gershwin: ninths and elevenths used casually, blues scales bending through otherwise tonal passages, syncopations that keep every phrase from ever settling into academic stiffness. There is a moment when the brass take up the main theme fortissimo and the piano answers with a cascade of scales and the whole thing becomes almost indecently pleasurable. This is music about the pleasure of skill, about virtuosity as a form of generosity, about the way the right person playing the right instrument at the right speed can make existence feel like a reasonable proposition. Put it on when you need momentum.