Oscar Levant Plays Levant & Gershwin

COMPOSERS: Gershwin,Levant
LABELS: Romophone
PERFORMER: Various collaborating artists
CATALOGUE NO: 81013-2 ADD mono

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Oscar Levant’s Piano Concerto sounds like a hectic synthesis of Gershwin and Schoenberg and reflects – according to its composer – ‘an arrogance and pretentiousness based on an economic and emotional insecurity [of the late Thirties]’. Levant goes on to add, somewhat quizzically perhaps, that ‘these are days we now look back on as happy’. And you can hear why, on Oscar Levant plays Levant and Gershwin, although the sound itself tends to crumble at climaxes.