Grofe's lost "Café Society' rediscovered

A missing piece of Philadelphia arts history was retrieved and revived when Philadelphia Sinfonia, a youth orchestra led by musical director and conductor Gary White, performed Ferde Grofe's long-forgotten Café Society.

Grofe, remembered today primarily for his Grand Canyon Suite (1931), represents an era when Americana was celebrated among musicians. His contemporaries included Aaron Copland and George Gershwin as well as the choreographers Agnes de Mille and Martha Graham. In its revival form, Grofe's Café Society was an unusually moving and brilliantly conceived performance.

Café Society was unearthed by Sharon Skeel, a Philadelphia dance historian, who discovered bits and pieces of the original composition while researching a project about the Catherine Littlefield Ballet Company, one of America's first ballet troupes.

Tuxedos and long gowns

Littlefield's Philadelphia-based troupe performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski, and Catherine Littlefield commissioned Grofe to compose an original score for her ballet company. Working collaboratively, Littlefield and Grofe created Café Society as a musical spoof of the then-fashionable club scene, with its gentlemen in tuxedos and ladies in long gowns.

Littlefield premiered the work in Chicago, then brought it home to Philadelphia in 1938, which was the last known performance of this ballet. In 1942 the federal Works Project Administration's orchestra performed what is believed to be Café Society's last complete concert appearance. Sixty-eight years later, the music and its story received a rousing re-introduction to its city of origin.

Beginning with Skeel's fragmented information, conductor White tracked down a piano reduction of Café Society in the Free Library's Fleisher Collection. But the score was in bits and pieces, with missing notes and phrases. White ended up at the Library of Congress, where he found all the missing notes. Meanwhile, Skeel found old contemporary film footage of the Littlefield Ballet Company as well as photographs and old dance programs. These were spun cleverly together at the Kimmel performance into a video accompaniment to the music.

Jazz and taxi horns

At the Kimmel, the young orchestra members, who play with the skill and aplomb of their adult contemporaries, reintroduced an audience from an entirely different century and mind set to Grofe's mix of jazz, taxi horns and odd instrumental effects. The result sounded a bit like what you might hear standing on a sidewalk with the door to a jazz club open wide enough for you to hear music accompanied by city sounds.

Overhead were ghostly images of long-departed ballerinas, looking a bit larger than (but just as talented as) today's ladies. In the audience Littlefield's elderly niece sat in the front row. Ferde Grofe Jr. sent a message thanking Philadelphia for retrieving and honoring his father's work.

There was nothing amateurish about this entire occasion. It felt special from the first minute the young musicians came on the stage, carefully tuning up their instruments, responding to the first violin concertmaster and instantaneously reacting to White's sharp direction.

We stepped out of the Kimmel onto a Broad Street sidewalk that would have seemed like Mars to either Littlefield or Grofe. Yet these two artists helped lay the foundations for the Avenue of the Arts. It's fitting that they were honored where their work was first performed, and that a full house got to hear this exciting music and step quietly back in time.♦


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