STARS PERFORM IN N.Y. TRIBUTE : STRIKING UP THE BAND FOR GERSHWINS

The Gershwin era seemed to come to life here this week with the announcement that “a treasure trove” of unpublished and missing songs and musical scores by George and Ira Gershwin and their contemporaries had been identified, and with a gala, star-studded “Gershwin Celebration” held in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of George Gershwin’s death.

Mikhail Baryshnikov, Leonard Bernstein, Bob Dylan and Rosemary Clooney were among the stars who appeared on stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Wednesday evening to perform music by the Brooklyn-born Gershwin and his lyricist brother, Ira--some of it not heard in its original version for half a century.

Earlier in the week, it was announced here that hundreds of songs and musical scores by George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Victor Herbert and other composers have been identified among 80 crates of music found five years ago in a Warner Bros. warehouse in nearby Secaucus, N.J.

Among the discoveries of manuscripts previously believed to be lost were Gershwin’s 1924 Broadway show “Primrose” and an original 1919 orchestration of his legendary “Swanee.”

Both were represented in the three-hour program at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, whose glittering black-tie audience of more than 1,000 included most of the Gershwin family.

“We were all very pleased,” Frances Godowsky, the Gershwins’ sister, said after the gala. “Of course, it (the evening) brought back a lot of memories.”

Godowsky’s favorable comments were echoed over and over at a candle-lit reception after the program, where many guests were overheard observing that Broadway could now use a show to match the one-time-only revue mounted at the academy.

“There obviously is a fantastic interest in this music . . . music of lasting appeal with intelligent, witty, civilized lyrics,” Burton Lane, one of the few surviving, still-productive composers from the Gershwin era, said in an interview Thursday.

Lane said the public has been deprived of such music “by record companies run by corporate rather than musically minded people, dedicated to making money, rather than to quality.”

“But there is a little stirring that things are changing,” he added, citing the enormous success of recent recordings of music from the Gershwin era by such vocalists as Barbra Streisand and Linda Ronstadt, and the tribute Wednesday, which was taped for future broadcast on public television’s “Great Performances” series.

Michael Tilson Thomas, music director and conductor for the gala, opened the program with the original 1924 “jazz version” of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” What followed was a virtual overview of the Gershwin career, from Tin Pan Alley to Broadway to Hollywood.

Leonard Bernstein made an unexpected appearance to play a Gershwin Prelude for piano, and Baryshnikov performed a trilogy of Gershwin works for ballet.

But most of the program favored Gershwin’s more popular music, especially for stage and films.