FANTASY ON GEORGE GERSHWIN'S PORGY AND BESS

Percy Grainger (b. Brighton, Victoria, Australia, July 8, 1882; d. White Plains, NY, USA, February 20, 1961)

George Gershwin (b. Brooklyn, NY, USA, September 26, 1898; d. Hollywood, CA, July 11, 1937) 

Composed 1935, arr. 1951; 22 minutes

Less than a year before George Gershwin died from a brain tumor in 1937, Porgy and Bess had run for 124 performances on Broadway. It was still far from universally acclaimed, and audiences were seeing only around three quarters of the folk-opera Gershwin had carefully conceived with his brother Ira and novelist DuBose Heyward. Porgy and Bess had to wait until 1976 to reveal its full operatic stature as an American classic, set in Catfish Row, Charleston, in the late 1920s.

Australian by birth and cultural identity, American by citizenship, and fiercely independent in outlook, Percy Aldridge Grainger offered no polite arrangement with his Fantasy on George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Instead, he produced an exuberant, full-blooded reimagining, treating Gershwin’s melodies as raw material – recognizable and intact, yet constantly reshaped through harmonic elasticity, rhythmic freedom, contrapuntal play, and pianistic flair. The tunes are unmistakably Gershwin: Summertime, I Loves You, Porgy, It Ain’t Necessarily So, and many others emerge clearly, their lyrical outlines preserved. What belongs to Grainger is everything around them – the transitions, the piling up of textures, the dramatic pacing, and the sheer physicality of the two-piano medium. He thickens harmony, sharpens contrast, and pushes the music decisively toward fantasy, far removed from literal transcription.

“I do not believe in arrangements that merely copy,” Grainger wrote. “I want them to be recreations – new works growing out of old ones.” (Self‑Portrait of Percy Grainger, ed. Gillies). The result balances homage with assertion: Gershwin supplies the melodic soul; Grainger supplies the architecture, propulsion, and audacious personality.  

— Program notes copyright © 2026 Keith Horner. Comments welcomed: khornernotes@gmail.com