Program Notes: New Year’s Celebration songs by Gershwin and Bonds

To help ring in 2025, the Minnesota Orchestra welcomes J’Nai Bridges to sing two sets of songs for mezzo and orchestra at the New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day concerts. Prior to intermission, she performs arrangements of George Gershwin’s Summertime, The Man I Love and I Got Rhythm—and in the concert’s second half, she sings Gershwin’s Stairway to Paradise and Love Is Here to Stay, plus Margaret Bonds’ version of the traditional spiritual He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.

SUMMERTIME

The highly popular song Summertime had its premiere as an aria in George Gershwin’s 1930 folk opera Porgy and Bess. It is the show’s first vocal piece, delivered as the curtain rises on Catfish Row, and is sung by the young mother Clara to her newborn. Summertime is one of several songs from Porgy and Bess that survived the show, becoming a hit in its own right, particularly by jazz performers. It has been recorded over 30,000 times.

The late Stephen Sondheim called the lyrics, written by DuBose Heyward, some of the best in American music theater history. “His lyrics make me cry,” he once told me in an interview. “Porgy’s real poetry is Heyward’s. And he had a real ear for singability.” Sondheim was particularly struck by the use of the word “and” in “Summertime and the livin’ is easy.” Sondheim said that he would have written “‘Summertime when the livin’ is easy,’ but not Heyward. ‘And’ sets up a whole poetic tone, and suddenly you’re plunged into the world of the way people talk.”

THE MAN I LOVE

The 1924 tune The Man I Love, with lyrics by George Gershwin’s brother Ira Gershwin, was intended for the musical comedy Lady, Be Good!, but in 1927 it wound up in another Gershwin musical, Strike Up the Band, the overture to which opened this week’s program. When that show closed, this “thrice-orphaned song” (as described by Ira) was inserted in the musical Rosalie, where it was cut before opening night. The song’s nomadic journey came in the days before the integrated musical (such as Oklahoma!), when a show’s songs had little (if any) to do with advancing the story.

Nevertheless, like Summertime, this song took off on its own and has been performed by many great artists, among them Benny Goodman, Ella Fitzgerald (with Nelson Riddle conducting), Dorothy Donegan, Sarah Vaughan and Liza Minnelli. It was one of the Gershwins’ biggest hits.

I GOT RHYTHM

If you were fortunate enough to have been in the audience last summer for the Minnesota Orchestra’s presentation of the movie An American in Paris, you heard Gene Kelly, backed by the Orchestra, sing this catchy tune to a group of Parisian youngsters. The song was written by the Gershwin brothers for the 1930 musical Girl Crazy, which boasts two other hits, Embraceable You and But Not for Me, that are still popular today. The then-little-known Ethel Merman closed the show’s first act with I Got Rhythm and apparently knocked George off his feet. “Don’t ever take singing lessons,” he cautioned her.

As for the lyrics, it wasn’t as if Ira was a bad grammarian, for he knew the proper expression was “I have rhythm,” but he chose alliteration over rhyme: “I got rhythm, I got music, I got my man—who could ask for anything more?” He must have been satisfied with his hard “g,” as he adapted it for Porgy’s “I got plenty of nothin’.”

STAIRWAY TO PARADISE

Composed in 1920, this is the earliest of the Gershwin songbook shared at this week’s concerts. It was written for a revue called George White’s Scandals. This was shortly before Gershwin learned the art of orchestration—so what is remarkable about today’s program is the use of Hershey Kay’s orchestration. Kay was an extremely talented, self-taught orchestrator for several Broadway shows and for George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet, most notably John Philip Sousa’s Stars and Stripes and Gershwin’s Who Cares? He was a classmate of Leonard Bernstein at the Curtis Institute, and later orchestrated Bernstein’s On the Town, Peter Pan and Candide.

The novice Ira’s lyrics demanded a brilliant production number:

“I'll build a stairway to Paradise / With a new step ev’ry day! / I'm gonna get there at any price / Stand aside, I’m on my way! / I’ve got the blues / And up above it’s so fair / Shoes! Go on and carry me there! / I’ll build a stairway to Paradise / With a new step ev’ry day.”

LOVE IS HERE TO STAY

George Gershwin died on July 11, 1937, of an inoperable brain tumor. He was 38. He had just finished composing Love Is Here to Stay for The Goldwyn Follies, the first Technicolor film produced by Samuel Goldwyn. It was released on February 20, 1938, and won an Oscar for best score, which was orchestrated by Edward B. Powell—whose orchestration we hear in these performances. Originally titled Our Love Is Here to Stay, the song has never fallen out of favor. It was included in that American in Paris film shown at Orchestra Hall last summer. Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett recorded it, and Harry Connick, Jr., sang it in the film When Harry Met Sally.

Listen for another of Ira’s skirting the rules of English grammar—his use of the word “and” where a comma wouldn’t have had the same effect: “The radio and the telephone and the movies that we know may just be passing fancies and in time may go....But our love is here to stay.”

Ira supplied the lyrics after George’s death, and he dedicated them to his brother. The Gershwins had also just written Love Walked In, and some critics argue that these two songs are the finest they, or any American songwriter, ever created.

HE’S GOT THE WHOLE WORLD IN HIS HANDS

Margaret Bonds (1913-1972) was a pianist and composer noted for her collaboration with the writer Langston Hughes, who is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance, the 100-year anniversary of which is currently being celebrated. Bonds wrote a musical piece in 1941 to accompany the Hughes poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”

As a youngster Bonds benefitted from her mother’s hospitality shown to Black American writers, artists and musicians. She became a graduate of Northwestern University (where she was permitted to study, but not allowed to live on campus, or use its practice facilities or swimming pool) and the Juilliard School of Music. She went on to write arrangements for traditional African American spirituals, among them, He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands, in 1927. It is that arrangement we hear in this week’s performances.

The song begins with “the whole world,” in general, and then it becomes specific, for example:

“He’s got the little bitty baby in His hands.”

“He’s got you and me, brother, in His hands.”

“He’s got you and me, sister, in His hands.”

“He’s got the son and his father in His hands.”

“He’s got the mother and the daughter in His hands.”

“He’s got everybody here in His hands.”

In 1953, Marian Anderson sang the song as part of The Ford 50th Anniversary Show before a live television audience of 60 million people watching on NBC and CBS. It was also made popular by the American Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson.

Program notes by Phillip Gainsley. Gainsley, who has hosted Minnesota Orchestra pre-concert discussions since 2004, was a regular panelist on the “Opera Quiz” heard during the intermissions of the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts. He currently writes performance reviews for Opera News magazine, and he is a speaker for the Metropolitan Opera Guild. His podcast Let's Talk Music features conversations with composers, conductors, directors, performers and other creative forces.