6/19/2006
George Antheil: The Zelig of 20th Century Music
Piano Concertos
Nos. 1, 2; "A Jazz Symphony," "Jazz Sonata," "Can-Can," Sonatina, "Death of Machines," "Little Shimmy"
George Antheil
Markus Becker, piano; NDR Radiophilharmonie; Eije Oue, conductor
cpo
George Antheil was the Leonard Zelig of 20th Century music. Here he is in 1920s Paris, the son of a Trenton shoe-store owner living above Sylvia Beach’s bookstore, and consorting with Joyce and Hemingway and that lot. He meets Stravinsky and basically rewrites large sections of Petruska for his own 1922 single movement Piano Concerto No. 1--and does it better than Stravinsky could have done it himself. Now, he’s in New York introducing the locals to his scandalous “mechanical ballet” which triggered riots in Paris, and out-gershing Gershwin (and channeling a future Leonard Bernstein) with A Jazz Symphony for Paul Whiteman. Then it’s off to Berlin for the Brecht of it, enter Hitler, and then cut to Hollywood where Antheil forges a modestly successful career as a film composer and invents a “secret communication systems” with Hedy Lemarr. Wait, is this the same guy who also writes a syndicated advice-to-the-lovelorn column and articles about romance and endocrinology? In his later years we find Antheil writing chamber music that Dvorak would have been pleased to claim as his own. Antheil’s colorful life and the difficulty of pigeonholing his music have often obscured the fact that he was one of the most naturally gifted composers of the 20th century, a kind of walking time machine whose mind moved easily across centuries of musical ideas and styles—sometimes going forward to places that nobody else had yet been. With this extraordinary new release, and the symphonies that preceded it, cpo has provided us with the performances we need to assess Antheil, the composer, rather than Antheil, the entertaining bad boy. The bottom line is that he’s a genuine American maverick and almost as good as he thought he was himself.
Piano ConcertosNos. 1, 2; "A Jazz Symphony," "Jazz Sonata," "Can-Can," Sonatina, "Death of Machines," "Little Shimmy"
George Antheil
Markus Becker, piano; NDR Radiophilharmonie; Eije Oue, conductor
cpo
George Antheil was the Leonard Zelig of 20th Century music. Here he is in 1920s Paris, the son of a Trenton shoe-store owner living above Sylvia Beach’s bookstore, and consorting with Joyce and Hemingway and that lot. He meets Stravinsky and basically rewrites large sections of Petruska for his own 1922 single movement Piano Concerto No. 1--and does it better than Stravinsky could have done it himself. Now, he’s in New York introducing the locals to his scandalous “mechanical ballet” which triggered riots in Paris, and out-gershing Gershwin (and channeling a future Leonard Bernstein) with A Jazz Symphony for Paul Whiteman. Then it’s off to Berlin for the Brecht of it, enter Hitler, and then cut to Hollywood where Antheil forges a modestly successful career as a film composer and invents a “secret communication systems” with Hedy Lemarr. Wait, is this the same guy who also writes a syndicated advice-to-the-lovelorn column and articles about romance and endocrinology? In his later years we find Antheil writing chamber music that Dvorak would have been pleased to claim as his own. Antheil’s colorful life and the difficulty of pigeonholing his music have often obscured the fact that he was one of the most naturally gifted composers of the 20th century, a kind of walking time machine whose mind moved easily across centuries of musical ideas and styles—sometimes going forward to places that nobody else had yet been. With this extraordinary new release, and the symphonies that preceded it, cpo has provided us with the performances we need to assess Antheil, the composer, rather than Antheil, the entertaining bad boy. The bottom line is that he’s a genuine American maverick and almost as good as he thought he was himself.
Jerry Bowles is founder and editor of Sequenza 21, the contemporary classical
music web portal which won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Internet Award in 2005.
music web portal which won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Internet Award in 2005.
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