By Mark Thomas Ketterson
Back in the late 1980s, in what now seems like an almost mythical time when stone-and-mortar record shops were releasing floods of compact discs that cost half a week’s salary, music lovers all over the globe were saving their pennies for an exciting new recording to be released on EMI. It was George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess with Simon Rattle and the London Philharmonic. Note-complete and based on Rattle’s recent production of the opera at Glyndebourne, this was the first digitally recorded Porgy, and a sonic wonder. One of the great delights in the set is heard in opera’s first few minutes, as the jazz pianist character Jasbo Brown riffs away on the overture’s themes for an extended period. Often severely truncated, the episode was here given complete, and the virtuosic, improvisatory interlude sets the tone of the piece to perfection. You want to hit “repeat” and hear it over and over.
Wayne Marshall sitting at the keyboard of an organ
The Jasbo was British conductor, keyboardist, and composer Wayne Marshall, caught here on the brink of what has become a dazzling international career. Marshall is one of contemporary classical music’s most interesting figures, whose musicianship has brought him to venues all over the world. His vast recorded output reveals an astonishing breadth of activity, ranging from standard classical organ repertory to music of Bach, Liszt, Brahms, and the entire Gershwin piano canon. He has conducted the operas of Jake Heggie and John Harbison, premiered James MacMillan’s organ concerto, and held conducting posts with the WDR Funkhausorchester and Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi.
“I read music, of course, but the ear is what tells us what it’s all about.”
What is fascinating about Marshall, however, is that despite his beginnings in more orthodox rep, this British-born, British-trained artist has primarily made his name as a supreme interpreter of American music. Ravinia will hear him on August 3 in a suite from Porgy as well as in the music of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim. “For me,” Marshall explains, “your American music is just as important as any Beethoven, or Haydn, or Mozart, or Brahms, or whatever. It’s the same to me. It’s not to be taken lightly. Porgy and Bess is a phenomenally difficult score. Yes, Gershwin wrote some light stuff, but some very serious stuff as well. And the music is not easy.”
Marshall playing George Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm” Variations on the 1997 Last Night of the Proms with the BBC Symphony, led by Sir Andrew Davis
Marshall was born in Oldham, Lancashire, to parents who originally hailed from Barbados. His family was very musical, including his two sisters. As a child, he was thrilled by the sound of the organ at church. “Church music was the bedrock of our musical education and upbringing,” he recalls. By age 3, Marshall was beginning to play the music he heard at church by ear. More remarkably, he began to improvise on the music to create compositions of his own. His natural abilities were so advanced that when the time came to begin formal training, he had a huge adjustment to make. “That was a big, big problem!” he laughs, “It was fine for maybe the first three or four weeks. But then one day, my teacher slammed the lid of the piano down and said, ‘Look. If you’re going to advance as a pianist, you’re going to have to learn to read music.’ So I had to play one note at a time and count, learn which was the right hand and the left hand, and the clefs, and all the whole notes, half notes, quarter notes. I had to learn to do what I could already do naturally. It was very strange. But I’m grateful for that, because otherwise I would not have become the musician that I am.”
When he was 8 years old, Marshall heard George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. “It was a revelation. I had never heard anything like it. I was fascinated by the sounds and colors and rhythm, by this harmonic language of George Gershwin. It was so amazing for me. I managed to persuade my parents to get the score and a recording. I listened to it for hours and became obsessed with this sound world. That led to my discovery of the Piano Concerto in F and other works. Likewise with Leonard Bernstein. Every Saturday afternoon, there was a big film on British television. The famous West Side Story film came on. I had never heard of this piece, and again it was just amazing to hear that music. These two composers added a very interesting foundation to my musical knowledge.”
Cynthia Haymon and Willard White as the title characters of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess at Glyndebourne in 1986, the first British production, where Marshall joined the cast as Jasbo Brown as well as the rehearsal staff. (photo: Guy Gravett/Glyndebourne)
Marshall’s destiny in American repertory was sealed with that pivotal Glyndebourne Porgy. “Back in ’86, my sister went down to Glyndebourne for an audition and asked me to play for her. They were also looking for someone to play Jasbo Brown. Simon Rattle gave me a half hour to go through the music and asked me to play it. I was accepted for the role, and I was also brought on as one of the repetiteurs. It was a real voyage of discovery because I had never worked in an opera house before. They had an all-Black cast and chorus, which was quite unheard of at that time. When it came to the performances, my job was finished after the first six or seven minutes of the show, so I just popped down to the pit and watched Simon conduct every night. It was fantastic. Then came the recording. And that was it for me. Before then my career was headed in a cathedral organist, recitalist direction, but the whole Glyndebourne experience was a complete gearshift. It opened the doors of my real music world.”
“American music is just as important as any Beethoven, or Haydn, or Mozart, or Brahms, or whatever. It’s not to be taken lightly. Yes, Gershwin wrote some light stuff, but some very serious stuff as well. And the music is not easy.”
Although Marshall is one of the most precise and polished musicians in the industry, his natural spontaneity has guided his style throughout his career. “I began with playing by ear, and in many ways that’s how I still look at music. I read music, of course, but the ear is what tells us what it’s all about. A lot of musicians nowadays don’t really have that opportunity to just play their instrument. As a conductor this is always a challenge, to get an orchestra to look beyond what they see in front of them. I constantly shout out, ‘Don’t read it, feel it.’ ”
Improvisation remains particularly central to his musical consciousness. “Let’s talk about George Gershwin. Gershwin was a great improviser, as was Bernstein. He wrote things down, but he was a very natural, gifted musician who could just sit down at the piano and entertain, just make things up and play. Gershwin was always looking for ways he could use his own improvisational skills in his own music. The cadenza that he wrote for the piano concerto is really kind of nondescript, and quite short. The two big solos in Rhapsody in Blue are what they are as well; they lend themselves to improvisation. Nowadays, I improvise my own cadenzas, especially the second movement to the concerto, which needs to have something a little bit more elaborate done with it. But that was the nature of the man. Gershwin was very spontaneous, and a lot of his music reflects the fact that he could just sit down and play. Whenever I play Rhapsody in Blue, I think about that first night and what it must have been like to hear Paul Whiteman’s band and Gershwin at the piano playing it the first time. Wow. It must have been amazing.”
Ravinia’s audience will hear Marshall improvise on a Stephen Sondheim song this summer, on a program that also includes Robert Russell Bennett’s stunning Gershwin suite Porgy and Bess: A Symphonic Picture and Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, as well as his Candide overture and the Divertimento for Orchestra. Some may be curious as to Marshall’s political thoughts on Porgy and West Side, as they are both pieces filled with racial strife written by white men; he really prefers to let the music speak for itself. “I’ve never been too much into this. We were brought up to believe that we are all the same. We are what we are.
“I am very much looking forward to performing with the Chicago Symphony and being at Ravinia. I was to have made my debut in 2020 with Bernstein’s White House Cantata, but of course that had to be postponed. I am so happy to be coming now, with some very different music. It is music that is a joy to conduct. It has been a continuing journey with this music.” ●
Mark Thomas Ketterson is the Chicago correspondent for Opera News. He has also written for the Chicago Tribune, Playbill, Chicago magazine, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Houston Grand Opera, and Washington National Opera at the Kennedy Center.