Gibbons's first two volumes of Gershwin piano music included a number of transcriptions of Gershwin's own playing, adapted from piano rolls and recordings (8/93). The results, although obviously authentic in one way, seemed to me somewhat hectic. This third volume is comprised of Gibbons's own arrangements, based on Gershwin's film music, two-piano pieces, and in the case of the ''Catfish Row'' Porgy and Bess suite, his orchestrations.
Not only is the music more substantial than in a lot of the selections on the first two CDs, the atmosphere seems more that of a performance and less of a technical exercise. The longest work is the Second Rhapsody, composed for a scene in the Gershwins' first Hollywood movie, Delicious (from which the best-known song is ''Blah, blah, blah''). The film starred Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, and in this sequence the heroine wanders frightened through Manhattan—it might be re-christened A Scotswoman in New York. George Gershwin referred to the main tune as his ''Brahmsian theme'' but today no one would mistake it for anything but Gershwin.
''For you, for me'', one of the melodies salvaged from their files by Ira Gershwin and used ten years after George's death, emerged in the 1947 film The Shocking Miss Pilgrim. Ira and Kay Swift hoped it would be a gold-mine and rated the tune higher than any among Gershwin's unpublished songs. The solo version of the Cuban Overture is Gibbons's own adaptation of Gershwin's four-hand arrangement; like the ''Catfish Row'' suite it makes formidable demands on the pianist and Gibbons gives them both virtuoso performances.
The recital ends with three of the standards Gershwin wrote in Hollywood during the last months of his life. ''They can't take that away from me'' must be a strong contender for the great songs of the twentieth century, and no one hearing ''Our love is here to stay'' can doubt that a premonition of death lingered somewhere in the composer's heart in the autumn of 1936.'