The East Hampton Star July 29, 1999

 

Jeffrey Biegel brought a different sort. of evening to those gathered in the make-believe tent of the John Drew Theater of Guild Hall. His celebration of the works of George Gershwin was entertaining, funny, educational, and profoundly musical.

Education And Flair

Mr. Biegel's stage presence and manner was reminiscent of a witty Catskills entertainer, but what he had to say about the classical influences and sources of Gershwin's music was thoughtful and on the button. He communicated to the audience Gershwin's antecedents in Chopin, Debussy, and Ravel, as well as Amer- ican blues and Jewish traditional music.

Gershwin's "Lullaby" was presented in a version set for string quartet, which Biegel surmises was composed as a student exercise.

The resident chamber ensemble of the festival Terence Tam, violin, Yosuke Kowasaki, violin, Martin Sher, viola, and Tonio Hinkle, cello performed this work with an insouciant flair.

Insights

This was followed by Mr. Biegel's performance of Gershwin's "Preludes" including three that are part of the familiar concert repertoire as well as three others and a fragment of a seventh. These rarities, recovered through Mr. Biegel's research, revealed insights into Gershwin's compositional techniques and thought processes.

Mr. Tam then joined Mr. Biegel in a performance of the three "Preludes" arranged for violin and piano by Jascha Heifetz. Here Mr. Biegel demonstrated sensitivity to the Score and his panner.

After the intermission, Mr. Biegel performed a nicely nuanced Piano version of "Blue Monday" a 20 minute "opera" Gershwin composed as part of a vaudeville variety program.

Technical Brilliance

And, I was pleasantly startled by Jeffrey Biegel's technical brilliance and thoughtful analyses of classical works by George Gershwin.

The Rhapsody

However, the work that to my mind established Mr. Biegel as a pianist of great intelligence and sensitivity was his performance of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" complete with improvisational passages omitted from the published scores.

His plastic shaping of phrasing, his intelligent structuring of this somewhat disorganized work into a profound architectonic whole was in turn whimsical, witty, chillingly profound, and sensually heated -- tied together by technical precision and a clean, unaffected style.