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Notable recordings

After the warm reception of Rhapsody in Blue by the audience at Aeolian Hall, Gershwin recorded several abridged versions of his composition in different formats. On June 10, 1924, Gershwin and Whiteman's orchestra created an acoustic recording running 8 minutes and 59 seconds and issued by the Victor Talking Machine Company. A year later, Gershwin recorded his performance on a 1925 piano roll for a two-piano version. Later, on April 21, 1927, he made an electrical recording with Whiteman's orchestra running 9 minutes and 1 second and again recorded by Victor. Nathaniel Shilkret purportedly conducted the electrical recording after a dispute between Gershwin and Whiteman. Whiteman's orchestra later performed a truncated version of the piece in the 1930 film The King of Jazz with Roy Bargy on piano.

Due to the length limitations of early recording formats, the first complete and unabridged recording of Gershwin's composition did not occur until the Great Depression. In July 1935, after several years of performing the rhapsody for sold-out audiences in Massachusetts, conductor Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra recorded the first unabridged version—nearly fourteen minutes in length—with Puerto Rican pianist Jesús María Sanromá for RCA Victor. For this first unabridged recording, Fiedler discarded Ferde Grofé's original 1924 arrangement and adapted the piece for a conventional symphony. At the time, contemporary critics praised Fiedler for jettisoning the so-called "jazzy sentimentality" of Grofé's earlier arrangement and adding a "more symphonic richness and authority."

During the final months of World War II, amid the box-office success of the Gershwin biographical film Rhapsody in Blue (1945), pianist Oscar Levant recorded the now iconic composition with Eugene Ormandy 's Philadelphia Orchestra on August 21, 1945. Levant had been an intimate friend of the deceased composer, and he sought to replicate Gershwin's idiomatic playing style in his performance. Levant's homage—labelled Columbia Masterworks 251—received rapturous reviews and became one of the best-selling record albums of the year. As a result of Levant's recording and the 1945 biographical film about Gershwin's life, a "Gershwin revival" ensued.

By the 1960s and 1970s, Gershwin's rhapsody had become a predictable staple of both concert performances and orchestra recordings; consequently, more diverse and irreverent interpretations appeared over time. In Summer 1973, Brazilian jazz-rock artist Eumir Deodato reinterpreted Gershwin's rhapsody in an abridged version that featured uptempo neo‐ samba rhythms. Although music critics derided Deodato's interpretation as "mangled" and barely recognizable, his single reached No. 41 on the "Hot 100" and No. 10 on "Easy Listening" on the Billboard charts, and No. 48 and No. 13 respectively in Canada. In the wake of Deodato's earlier reinterpretation, French pianist Richard Clayderman recorded a similarly abridged disco arrangement in 1978 which became one of his signature pieces.

Concurrent with the emergence of these more diverse interpretations, scholarly interest revived in the original 1924 arrangement by Ferde Grofé which had not been performed since the end of the Jazz Age. On February 14, 1973, conductor Kenneth Kiesler and pianist Paul Verrette performed Grofé's original arrangement on the University of New Hampshire campus. Soon after, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and the Columbia Jazz Band recorded Grofé's arrangement in 1976, as did conductor Maurice Peress with pianist Ivan Davis in 1984 as part of a 60th-anniversary reconstruction of the entire 1924 concert.

One hundred years after the debut of Gershwin's rhapsody in 1924, tens of thousands of orchestras as well as solo pianists have recorded the piece, both abridged and unabridged. A number of these recordings have garnered critical recognition such as pianist Michel Camilo 's 2006 rendition which won a Latin Grammy Award.