Lucas Debargue performs Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue and Ravel's Piano Concerto in G

American maestro Joseph Swensen leads the Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine in a Franco-American feast of music by early 20th-century near-contemporaries Maurice Ravel and George Gershwin — including the Rhapsody in Blue and Piano Concerto in G, both performed by French piano virtuoso Lucas Debargue! When the younger Gershwin asked Ravel for advice on writing music, the latter is reported to have quipped, "why write bad Ravel when you write such good Gershwin?" Each composer captured something quintessential about his place and time, drawing on transatlantic modes and new styles like jazz while shaping the new musical idioms of their respective nations. Ravel's playful but poetic Ma Mère l'Oye (Mother Goose) and Gershwin's tone poem An American in Paris — so adventurous and irresistible that it inspired the film with Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron — bookend Debargue's raucous and rhythmic selections, running the gamut from the chromatic pyrotechnics of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue to the effervescent jazz and heart-rending lyricism of Ravel's Piano Concerto in G.