Piano Concerto in C

Self-Portrait with Allen Tanner, circa 1924-28 by Pavel Tchelitchew

Portrait of Vladimir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke) by Pavel Chenmuyer

Vladimir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke), Piano Concerto in C (Scott Dunn, piano)

But by becoming marked as the “new Diaghilev protege merging from out of nowhere Russia via the United States” of the Paris salons, Vernon Duke gained the power to move on notable terms among his kind; and that gain for a young exiled Russian pianist-composer was serious.

To speak of gain while Vernon Duke, basking in the light and sunshine of Diaghilev’s invitation to write a ballet (Zephyr et Flore), and feeling a young man’s mind spreading itself with a luxurious sense of freedom in the world to his remotest past, seems appropriate.  Everything to such a mind was gain.  All experience filtered down through layer after layer of perception and reflection, enriching and nourishing.  The utmost we can say, is that he had taken to heart the lessons of his work with George Gershwin, Rubinstein and the Piano Concerto.

Perhaps the most branded upon him was his bucolic Prokokievian sense of melody and chord voicings.  His tendency to lean upon the musical thinking and structures of his Russian peers rings out most happily in homespun Russian joys and sorrows.

Because he also was a prolific diarist, we are now able to see into a window in time to the very moment when this branding must have began.  It might have begun in his home with Allen Tanner and Pavel Tchelitchew at No. 150 Blvd. Montparnasse, as recorded in his autobiography, Passport to Paris, pgs. 109-110:

“Well, let’s hear this music that you came to conquer Paris with,” Tchelitchew said, winking good-naturedly at Tanner. I sailed into the the Concerto with gusto and was rewarded by the astonished faces of my two listeners.

“What’s gotten into you, Dima?” Allen queried, pouting no longer. “This is a really good concerto—a little too much Prokofiev, a bit of undigested Rachmaninoff here and there, but you can write music—of that there is no doubt.”

Pavlik roared with pleasure, then sat down, suddenly pensive: “Yes, you might do…for Beaumont, not for Diaghilev. Diaghilev is too great a snob and wants names. However, the Count de Beaumont is launching a ballet season with Picasso, Massine and Satie, is calling it Soirées de Paris, and we all know him. He may commission a score from you.”

Allen made a face.  “What about Valitchka?” he asked Pavlik.

“Not Valitchka Bolm, surely?” I cut in.

They both laughed.“No, silly—Nouvel, Valitchka Nouvel, Diaghilev’s business manager and business administrator—a man, not a girl. He’s crazy about Allen and who can tell, may take a fancy to you,” went on Tchelitchew. He knows a lot about music, having founded the Contemporary Music Group with Nourok in Russia. Valitchka is a crotchety old boy, but he means well.”

I expressed my delight at the prospect of meeting the the male Valitchka and Allen promised to telephone him in the morning.

Vladimir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke), Piano Concerto in C (Scott Dunn, piano)

Vladimir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke), Piano Concerto in C (Scott Dunn, piano)

Vladimir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke) became a kind of omni-present shadow to Sergei Prokokiev in the circle of creative geniuses who composed Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe, one more refugee in a group of Russian patronage system trained artists in exile. Prokokiev, his childhood friend from their composition class with Reinhold Gliere at the Kiev Conservatory, reviewed the Piano Concerto in C, saying that it was “full of superior melodies, very well designed, harmonically beautiful and not too ‘modernist’.” Igor Stravinsky, had him perform as one of the four pianists, along with Francis Poulenc, George Auric and Vittorio Rieti in the Ballet Russe’s London premiere of his Les Noces. All except Rieti would go on to compose scores for upcoming ballet seasons. His Piano Concerto became his passport into a sub-group known as Les Nouveaux Jeunes, forerunners to Les Six (Georges Auric, Louis Aurey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Germaine Tailleferre). Conductor Sergei Koussevitsky introduced his First Symphony on the same program as Prokokiev’s Fiery Angel as if they were companion compositions, reflecting their shared ongoing musical dialogue.

An ocean away, George Gershwin had been enchanted by the second theme of the Piano Concerto in private rehearsals by Dukelsky. Some of the few remaining first hand accounts from someone who knew Gershwin well is preserved here in an article Vernon Duke wrote called, “Gershwin, Schillinger and Dukelsky: Some Reminiscences”:

“I first encountered George Gershwin’s name in 1921 in Constantinople I was then seventeen, just out of a Russia torn by the Civil War that followed the October Revolution of 1917. In the club run for the Russian refugees by the YMCA, I found some American popular songs—mostly Turkish reprints. Except for Irving Berlin’s All By Myself, with its fine ragtime gait, I was not impressed with the banal syncopations of this music.

Then one day a Turkish edition of a piece bewilderingly entitled Swanee by composer bewilderingly named Gershwin fell into my hands. The dash and drive, the rhythmic vigor, and, above all, the unmistakable musicality of the number made me sit up instantly.

I reached the United States in 1922 and met George in the same year through Eva Gauthier, the fine artist who did so much for new music. Miss Gauthier sang some pretentious and excessively dissonant songs of mine at a concert of the International Composers’ Guild. I don’t remember Gershwin’s reaction to them, but I do remember mine to George’s playing of his tunes. To anyone who has not heard Gershwin play, his piano magic hard to describe.

Gershwin impressed me as a superbly equipped and highly-skilled composer—not just a concocter of commercial jingles. His extraordinary left hand performed miracles in counter-rhythms, shrewd canonic devices, and unexpected harmonic shifts.”

George Gershwin, Swanee from Artis Wodehouses’s Gershwin Plays Gershwin: The Piano Rolls)

To listen to Vladimir Dukelsky’s Piano Concerto in C attentively, is to become aware how little one knows about him. It is also to become aware of the gullibility with which we had accepted his more popular incarnation as Vernon Duke. At what moment and by what means this alias version of Sergei Prokokiev’s dear friend and Vladimir Horowitz’s classmate way back at the Kiev Conservatory fades into a montage of Vladimir Dukelsky is difficult to ascertain. Some people attribute it to the first performance of the concerto in 1999 as part of the “The Gershwin Circle,” a series of performances which focused on the international impact of American pianism, with George Gershwin and his music as a nucleus, presented by the American Composers Orchestra in Carnegie Hall.

This composition is Dukelsky-Duke’s ‘lost’ concerto, originally written in 1923 at the request of the rising concert pianist and Aeolian Duo-Art and AMPICO player piano recording artist, Arthur Rubinstein. Perhaps Arthur Rubinstein with his phrase about ‘a one-movement, pianistically grateful, not too cerebral’ piece gave momentum to this 20 year old Russian emigré who was playing the piano in restaurants and conducting and composing for vaudeville and burlesque. Or perhaps it was the phrase ‘go to Paris’ where a premiere would be easier for Rubinstein to stage. Vladimir Dukelsky went to Paris, Arthur Rubinstein did not. The ‘lost’ Piano Concerto in C stayed in its original two-piano score for 76 years until Scott Dunn orchestrated it for its 1999 premiere.