Showing posts with label Love Walked In. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Love Walked In. Show all posts

Thursday, October 3, 2024

Ружена Сикора Любовь вошла Gershwin in Russian Love Walked In



Nothing seemed to matter any more
Didn't care what I was headed for
Time was standing still
No one counted till
There came a knock, knock, knocking at the door

Love walked right in and drove the shadows away
Love walked right in and brought my sunniest day
One magic moment, and my heart seemed to know
That love said "Hello!"
Though not a word was spoken

One look and I forgot the gloom of the past
One look and I had found my future at last
One look and I had found a world completely new
When love walked in with you

This is the only vocal version of this amazing, poignant song (one of my favorite Gershwins) that I actually like. There's an astonishing piano version with Jack Gibbons, but when you try to find a singer who can do it justice, you discover dud after dud. People mess with it too much, when all you have to do is sing it, sing the notes. Gershwin songs are so powerful, they almost sing themselves, in just about any language.

So I included the lyrics in English. It's interesting to note that Gershwin's parents were Russian immigrants who fled the pogroms and started a new life in America, which was then called the Land of Opportunity. (I won't get into what it has become.) George's birth name was Jacob Gershovitz. Gershwin the genius still prevails, but it's interesting to find unlikely versions among the thousands or perhaps millions of recordings in which singers have tried to capture the magic.


And I cannot resist including the Jack Gibbons version, which appears at the end of this video following his kick-ass version of Kicking the Clouds Away (which is a pocket version of Rhapsody in Blue, teeming with all that edgy urban energy and panache). The chord structure, it has been pointed out, has similarities to impressionists like Debussy. George was more humble than most people realized, and once told Maurice Ravel that he would like to study composition with him. He answered, "But then you'd be a second-rate Ravel rather than a first-rate Gershwin." So true. George remained first-rate all the way. 

By the way! Re-watching this, I see that there are snippets of home movies featuring George at the piano (he made very few recordings, unfortunately, and in his brief movie appearances he looks like a ghost), and the man sitting next to him is no less than Arnold Schoenberg, the famous "modern" composer. At the time, he was virtually unknown, having just arrived in New York from Nazi-occupied Germany. George helped pay his passage to America, thus escaping persecution and certain death. In essence, Gershwin saved his life.

They're obviously pals, providing yet more proof that other composers instantly recognized his genius. It's not just brilliant technique, but that universal quality which invited people into his music. We all wanted to be a part of it - we all wanted to sit around the piano and just listen to him play - and we can still do it, given Jack Gibbon's uncanny way of channeling Gershwin's energy. 

I feel like I was there - and maybe I still am.


Saturday, January 9, 2016

George walked in





This is one of those nice GG videos that features photos and even snippets of film from his life. Rare enough, but what happened last night? What happened when I was so unprepared for the second song (Love Walked In) on this video?

What happened is, I felt astonishment, and I cried. Cried because, stripped of all the schmaltz, we have a version so close to what George would play that it's almost scary. He was not a sentimental pianist and played with tremendous energy and verve. The love songs shone and gleamed, shot through with sunlight. He was solar rather than lunar, though that sunnyness  was sometimes sadly, darkly eclipsed.

I heard Debussy in those newly-revealed, stripped-down chords, but I heard something absolutely original too. I don't know of any other composer who can knock me back with a single chord. It's remarkable.

So we have the two sides of George here, almost aggressive honky-tonk (and believe me, in the few recordings we have of him, he played fast and he played hard) and sheer, naked poetry. Jack Gibbons has tried to peel back all the layers of sentimentality and get back to essential Gershwin, and it's like restoring a gorgeous Renaissance painting that has been dulled by a thousand layers of varnish and time. What is revealed is startling, so fresh the paint is still wet.

The song begins at 3:01. It's one of those songs that is so simple, it's hardly there. As Salieri says in Amadeus, remove even one element, one note and the whole structure would fall down. And yet it is something that will last forever.




Nothing seemed to matter any more,
Didn't care what I was headed for
Time was standing still,
No one counted till
There came a knocking at the door.


Love walked right in and drove the shadows away ;
Love walked right in and brought my sunniest day.
One magic moment, and my heart seemed to know
That love said Hello ! ,
Though not a word was spoken.


One look and I forgot the gloom of the past ;
One look and I had found my future at last.
One look and I had found a world completely new,
When love walked in... with you.

And now, the inevitable P. S. :


And here is the best vocal version I've heard, sung sweetly and sincerely with a simple, clean, unsentimental orchestration and a fantastic segue into "swing" near the end (the last dreamy note reminding me of an Astaire and Rogers film). I DON'T KNOW WHO THIS IS! But I think that Gershwin, who always referred to himself as a Russian, would have appreciated this.




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