Porgy and Bess: A Symphonic Picture

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Arranged by Gershwin's good friend Robert Russell Bennett in 1942, Porgy and Bess: A Symphonic Picture includes most of the best-known songs from the Gershwin opera, though not exactly in the order of their appearance. Though the Symphonic Picture is sometimes dismissed as a sequence of the opera's "greatest hits," the first well-known melody, "Summertime," is not heard until nearly seven minutes into the medley. It was commissioned by Fritz Reiner, then conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Bennett credits Reiner with having chosen the excerpts, and their sequence. Reiner aimed for a precisely-24-minute length; it was designed to fit three 78-rpm records (4 minutes per side). Though Reiner requested the piano (which Gershwin used in the opera) be eliminated, the actual orchestration is in many passages very closely based on Gershwin's original scoring.

The above is based on Bennett's program note for the March 1943 Pittsburgh Symphony premiere, and also Bennett's memoir: The Broadway Sound: The Autobiography and Selected Essays of Robert Russell Bennett. Edited by George J. Ferencz. University of Rochester Press, 1999 (Eastman Studies in Music 12)