He was chiefly renowned for his intimate personal and professional association with George Gershwin; after Gershwin’s early death in 1937, Levant virtually owned Rhapsody in Blue and the Concerto in F. For a time, during the 1940s, he was the highest-paid concert pianist in the United States, spicing his performances with banter and self-lacerating quips. Assaying Beethoven’s “Tempest” sonata, he might promise to play “with my customary arthritic abandon” and add: “This piece has never had a worthy interpretation. And it still won’t.” – Los Angeles Review of Books