Kern, Jerome A Personal Selection arranged for string quartet by Bill Thorp

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Kern, Jerome A Personal Selection arranged for string quartet by Bill Thorp

FE1056 Jerome Kern, A Personal Selection
arranged for string quartet by Bill Thorp

Pick Yourself Up was written for the film Swing Time (1936) starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Though it begins with Fred pretending to be a dance novice (“Please teacher, teach me something…”) it ends with the pair dancing what has been described as one of their very greatest screen duets, playful and boundlessly joyous.
Interestingly, Barack Obama in his 2009 inauguration speech referenced the song’s chorus: “Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of rebuilding America”. (Prescient words…)

Bill was written in 1917 for one of Broadway’s celebrated Princess Theatre musicals, Oh, Lady! Lady!, with lyrics by P. G. Wodehouse, but was withdrawn (somewhat surprisingly to modern ears) for being too melancholy. However, ten years later it found a good home in the Act 2 nightclub scene of Show Boat (1927), with Wodehouse’s lyrics revised by Oscar Hammerstein ll (for which he would take no credit).

If Show Boat is Kern and Hammerstein’s masterpiece then Ol’ Man River is its iconic song, wonderfully encapsulating the show’s racial themes as much as Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man and (to a lesser extent) Bill embody its theme of enduring, tragic love. Besides evoking the wisdom and indifference of the river, the song is remarkable for “compressing the suffering, resignation and anger of an entire race into 24 taut lines, and doing it so naturally that it’s no wonder folks assume the song is a Negro Spiritual” (Mark Steyn).

Who? was written in 1925 for the musical Sunny (with lyrics by Hammerstein and Horbach), and was famously sung by Judy Garland in the 1946 Kern biopic Till The Clouds Roll By. Although it has been suggested that the second piece in this collection provides the answer to the song’s titular question, the arranger clearly indicates otherwise and, despite a late-emerging and decidedly Wagnerian distraction, invites you to discover how…
Bill Thorp

Score & parts £15