Votapek plays Gershwin

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A brilliant player revelling in Gershwin - who could ask for more?
Gramophone Magazine April 2007

Broadway belters, opera singers and symphony orchestras aren't the only beneficiaries of George Gershwin's prolific imagination. So, naturally, are pianists, who revel in the virtuosity Gershwin applied both to manuscripts paper and keyboard. Among the musicians brilliantly inclined to savour the American composer's inventions is Ralph Votapek, the first gold medalist at the Van Cliburn International piano competition in 1962.
Votapek's captivating new disk features Gershwin's original versions of piano works and arrangements of his Broadway songs, as well as Earls Wild's transcriptions of Porgy and Bess themes and two immortal tunes, "Oh, lady be good" and "Embraceable you". Never mind that all of Ira Gershwin's (and some of DuBose Heyward's) lyrics are gone. In these incarnations, the songs and operatic excerpts sound like the freshest creations, especially in Votapek's charismatic performances.
The pianist is ideally suited to the material. He brings bountiful swagger or lyricism to the music where needed, and he invests rhythms with the same suave flexibility that Gershwin himself applied to his compositions. It's a pleasure to hear these pieces shaped so lucidly, with judicious use of the pedal and keen attention to contrapuntal lines to set textures in crystalline perspective.
Votapek, professor of piano and artist-in-residence emeritus at the Michigan State University School of Music, clearly finds this music irresistible and moving. He acknowledges the Lisztian flourishes in Wild's Grand Fantasy on Themes from Porgy and Bess while making sure that the flamboyance never overwhelms the sincerity and insouciance of the source.
The songs, Promenade and Preludes also could hardly have a better champion. A photograph on the disk jacket shows Votapek playing for Paul Whitman in 1956. It's no surprise that the famous bandleader and Gershwin colleague appears to be enchanted by the young pianist's exceptional artistry.
Donald Rosenberg