Celebrate America: 250 Years!
A two-piano recital performed by Paul Posnak and Anita Castiglione
Farmington Valley School, October 11, 2025
Program:
George Gershwin — Four songs
Florence Price — “Coreopsis,” “Two Spirituals”
Gershwin — “Cuban Overture”
Leonard Bernstein — “Symphonic Dances from ‘West Side Story'”
Aaron Copland — “Variations on a Shaker Tune,” from “Appalachian Spring”
In a benefit performance for the Otis Library, the lively piano team of Posnak and Castiglione celebrated America’s 250th birthday by performing an audience-friendly program of late-19th- and early-20th-century American works. All of these “classical” works were cross-fertilized with what is sometimes called “the vernacular tradition,” meaning that they reflect their composers’ immersion in aspects of some of the country’s diverse popular and folk cultures. This made for a highly appealing, audience-friendly program, especially as performed with the verve and imagination of this husband-and-wife team. It seems apt that a program which demonstrates the diversity of cultural influences characteristic of American music should serve to support a community library, where minds can be opened and local neighbors can learn about their ties to the larger national family.
Pianist Paul Posnak has a wide-ranging repertoire, and one of his specialties is creating and performing scores based on improvised recordings of popular pianists from the 1920s and ’30s, especially Fats Waller and George Gershwin. His transcriptions of Waller have been published, and he has created two piano arrangements based on Gershwin’s own piano improvisations on his songs. The current program began with a set of four such arrangements: “’S Wonderful,” “But Not for Me,” “Someone to Watch over Me,” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” As soon as the first song began, I was transported back a century to the era of the player-piano, which was the first medium that recorded Gershwin. The piano-roll medium permitted players to add extra parts to what their two hands could normally accomplish, and the result was a rich, complex texture covering a wide range of the keyboard. The impression of time travel was actually enhanced by the somewhat worn sound quality of the two pianos at the performers’ disposal—instead of a school auditorium, we were transported to a smoky speakeasy with Gershwin, cigar in mouth, elaborating on his own tunes. Posnak’s grasp of this style is so secure that he is able to seamlessly weave in his own enriched harmonies and countermelodies. The concluding song, from “Porgy and Bess,” was a theme and variations that imaginatively magnified the brilliantly diabolical character Sportin’ Life’s debunking of the Bible.
Later in the program, Gershwin returned in a different role, that of the composer of larger-scale classical forms, in this case the “Cuban Overture” of 1932. By this time, Gershwin had mastered larger forms in masterpieces such as his Piano Concerto (1925) and “An American in Paris” (1928), both incorporating jazz and blues idioms. For “Cuban Overture,” Gershwin sponged up the syncopated dance rhythms that he encountered on a trip to Havana and expanded them into a large form that offered him a chance to explore complex rhythms and non-standard harmonies (i.e., chords loaded with dissonances). I was struck by the similarities and differences between this score and “An American in Paris”: Both begin by evoking the excitement and bustle of a lively capital city, moving on to a lyrical and nostalgic second theme; but where the earlier work used the blues to evoke the homesickness of a displaced American, here the lyricism seemed more indigenous. Gershwin’s ability to channel his musical persona into alternate identities shows itself here, foreshadowing what he was able to accomplish three years later in “Porgy and Bess.”
If Charles Ives is known for anything, it is for his love of embedding vernacular materials (e.g., patriotic songs, hymns, fiddle tunes, and popular music) into classical forms treated in unconventional and imaginative ways. The work on this program, however, connects to a well-established American tradition—that is, variations on national airs. Its predecessors include organ compositions by French composer Alexandre Guilmant and American Dudley Buck, both of whom the young Ives was familiar with from his work as a church organist in Danbury during his early teenage years (when he was called “the youngest organist in the state”). Ives knew Buck’s “Variations and Fugue on the Star-Spangled Banner,” and he later had a chance to study organ with him in New Haven. These works, often improvised, treated the familiar tunes as opportunities to demonstrate virtuosity and imagination. When Ives performed his “Variations” in an 1891 recital in Brewster, N.Y., at age 17, apparently the boys in the audience got excited and marched in the aisles waving flags. The variations treat the melody as a polonaise, a circus jig (with a comic chromatic tag) and as a hymn with counter-melody reminiscent of the “Tannhauser Overture,” along with two “polytonal” interludes pencilled into the ink copy of the score, in which each of the player’s hands plays a phrase of the tune in different keys. The work foreshadows many of the traits that the mature composer would develop more intensely throughout his career and has proved one of his most popular works, having been arranged for orchestra by William Schuman, for band by William Rhoads, and in this version for two pianos by Danny Holt.
Black spirituals reside at the root of many popular genres and have also inspired “classical” works from Dvorak’s “Symphony from the New World” on, particularly in the symphonic works of younger Black composers such as William Grant Still and William Levi Dawson. Knowledge of this repertory has recently been expanded to include the works of neglected composer Florence B. Price, whose vast multi-genre output is currently being excavated. Posnak-Castiglione brought forth very appealing compositions of Price for this program previously unknown to me: “Coreopsis,” inspired by the flower, and two arrangements of “Negro Spirituals”: “Every Time I Feel the Spirit,” and “I Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray.” The first work, inspired by the plant of that name, is lyrical and harmonically rich in Price’s accessible vein, while the spiritual arrangements demonstrate the capacity for spirituals to serve as the basis for diverse creative interpretations, much like Bach’s use of Lutheran hymns.
While Leonard Bernstein’s “Symphonic Dances from ‘West Side Story’” also reflects its composer’s absorption of various vernacular idioms (jazz, Latin dance music), its colorful orchestration, including elaborate percussion, seems intrinsic to its appeal. I found John Musto’s two-piano version to seem relatively bland despite the best efforts of the performers to differentiate the colors of the textural layers, perhaps revealing the limitations of the instruments in use. But the final item on the printed program found the two performers sitting side by side in piano-duo configuration to perform Bennett Lerner’s deeply moving arrangement of Copland’s “Variations on a Shaker Melody” from his ballet “Appalachian Spring,” which is of course the familiar “Simple Gifts,” a nod to an important aspect of our local Berkshire culture. In this way, the program completed its survey of the eclectic American vernacular as a fundamental source of inspiration to composers who have crafted collectively an American musical identity, performed with idiomatic style and appropriate affection and bravura.
