Listening for America with the New York Philharmonic

This pre-concert talk for a Bravo! Vail performance by the New York Philharmonic with the preeminent pianist Emanuel Ax invites audiences to hear George Gershwin’s "An American in Paris" and John Williams’s "Piano Concerto" as two vivid chapters in the ongoing story of American music’s movement through jazz, popular culture, concert tradition, and public imagination. Gershwin’s 1928 tone poem imagines an American abroad, translating Parisian street sounds, urban motion, blues inflections, and the cosmopolitan energy of the Jazz Age into orchestral form. Williams’s 2025 concerto, written specifically for Ax, looks from another vantage point: its three movements evoke the pianistic worlds of Art Tatum, Bill Evans, and Oscar Peterson, not by reproducing their jazz worlds directly, but by remembering, abstracting, and reimagining their sounds through the concert hall. Together, the works suggest that American music is not a single style but a chain of translations: from street to stage, fro…