Composed 1924; Duration: 17 minutes

First BPO Performance: March 18 & 20, 1951 (Oscar Levant, piano; William Steinberg, conductor)

Last BPO Performance: September 29 & October 1, 2017 (Charlie Albright, piano; JoAnn Falletta, conductor)

In 1924, on a cold January evening at a New York billiard parlor, Ira Gershwin showed his brother George a newspaper article in which bandleader Paul Whiteman claimed that George was composing a jazz concerto for an upcoming concert at Aeolian Hall. The news puzzled Gershwin, who had declined the invitation.

George Gershwin was a gifted pianist who left school at 15 to work as a song-pusher for the Tin Pan Alley publishers, who dominated popular music at the time. By the 1920s, composers had yet to successfully shorten the distance between the orchestral concert hall and the smoke-filled jazz clubs and dance halls that provided the edgy soundtrack for the roaring twenties, but Gershwin tried his hand at it with his one-act jazz opera, Blue Monday (1922).

After some arm-twisting, Gershwin agreed to provide a work with only a few weeks before the concert. Whiteman’s concert was a slog. Titled “An Experiment in Modern Music,” the Palais Royal Orchestra performed for a sold-out crowd some 26 movements with the tone of a lecture-recital investigating the formal aspects of jazz. Whatever tired and dwindling audience remained for the second-to-last work was treated to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

The inexperienced Gershwin relied on Whiteman’s arranger, Ferde Grofé, to orchestrate the work, the piano solo was almost entirely improvised, and the famous sliding clarinet solo that opens the work was initially a joke. While some critics panned it for its formal incoherence, despite their protestations, Gershwin had struck lightning, successfully merging two worlds that were previously divided by class, race, and age. –Chaz Stuart