Dana Suesse (1911 – 1987)
Nadine Dana Suesse was born in Shreveport, Louisiana. Her mother was an opera singer, and she began playing piano at an early age. She later pursued a more formal study of piano under a pupil of Franz Liszt, and composition under one of George Gershwin’s teachers. After the war, she studied composition in Paris for three years with Nadia Boulanger.
Dana Suesse composed many popular songs, including “You Ought to Be in Pictures,” “Whistling in the Dark,” “My Silent Love,” and “Blue Moonlight,” but she also composed jazz-influenced music for piano and for orchestra, often with piano. Here is her 1931 piano composition Jazz Nocturne:
Pianist Sara Davis Buechner has recorded an entire album of Dana Suesse piano music under the title Jazz Nocturne.
In 1932, bandleader Paul Whiteman — best known today for his 1924 premiere of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue in a concert entitled “An Experiment in Modern Music” in Aeolian Hall — commissioned Dana Suesse for a piano concerto. Concerto in Three Rhythms was premiered at Whiteman’s fourth “Experiment in Modern Music” concert at Carnegie Hall.
Here’s a recent performance of Concerto in Three Rhythms, unfortunately without video:
In 1933, she was profiled in a “Talk of the Town” in the December 16, 1933 issue of The New Yorker under the title “Girl Gershwin":
We are going to press too early to know what the public reception will be of “Eight Valses for Piano and Orchestra” that Paul Whiteman is playing at the Metropolitan December 15th, but we know something about the composer, Miss Dana Suesse. It’s pronounced “Sweez.” She is only twenty-one, and is known as “the girl Gershwin” because she’s good at both Tin Pan Alley and symphonic stuff...
Miss Suesse was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, and was one of those prodigies. She began to fool around with the piano at about two. She didn’t take lessons for seven years after that, but at four she could play the Sextette from “Lucia” rather creditably, as she recalls. She learned it from a phonograph record. When she was eight, she composed her first piece, calling it, redundantly, “Evening Sunset."... When she was sixteen she refused a scholarship at a Chicago conservatory and came to New York to study piano with Alexander Siloti and composition with Rubin Goldmark. She experimented with jazz and wrote several successes. It’s all as simple as that.
Personally, Miss Suesse is tall, very slender, with gray eyes and reddish hair.... [S]he has perfect pitch and can compose sitting in bed, not needing a piano. When Whiteman first got interested in her and asked for a piece for his concert in February, 1932, she did her “Concerto in Three Rhythms” in three weeks.... She’s now working on a concerto for two pianos and orchestra, and on a full-fledged symphony. She thinks she’s pretty lucky to be, so far as she knows, the only girl symphonic composer in the world."I haven’t any competition,” she says. “It’s a cinch.”
Here is that Concerto for Two Pianos, apparently not completed until 1941:
In 1942 she composed The Cocktail Suite for piano. Here is Sara Davis Buechner playing the final two movements after a brief introduction:
This 2016 piano recital in Odessa, Ukraine, includes three piano compositions by Dana Suesse:
The video includes some spoken introductions. At time 1:50 is the 110th Street Rhumba (1941); at 5:20 is the complete four-movement Cocktail Suite ("Old-Fashioned,” “Champagne,” “Bacardi,” and “Manhattan"); and at 18:45 is Evening in Harlem (1936) also known as Afternoon of a Black Faun.