Customer Reviews

Antheil: Capital of the World/Symphony 5/Archipelago

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I came to know and appreciate Antheil's music while a student at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. "Capital of the World" was once extremely popular and this recording demonstrates why with catchy Spanish-flavored music. The Fifth Symphony "Joyous" contains infectious melodies and a strong "boogie-woogie" beat and was a favorite of critic and fellow composer Virgil Thompson. This is my personal favorite on the CD. The early "Archipelago" is Antheil's take on the "rhumba" and is very interesting. "Hats off" to Barry Kolman and the Slovak State Philharmonic Orchestra. Their obvious enthusiasm for Antheil's music results in an excellent sonic treat from this rarely-heard (and undeservedly so) composer.

If Antheil infrequently sounds like Shostakovich or Prokofiev it's because he's consciously quoting. Otherwise, in fact, and after a long conversation with a certain conductor who was doing the Ballet Mechanique at Tanglewood, it might be that those Soviet composers instead may well have been influenced by Antheil--he was after all the "Bad Boy" during the Twenties. If one wanted to sound progressive (and not like Schoenberg or Stravinsky) George from New Jersey was your man. People tend to forget that. Listening to any of his major works I often wonder how this bizarre idea of his lack of originality ever came into being. It's like saying Berlioz was ripping off Schubert and Schumann.

Anyway, this is all posh. This music, and the symphony especially, sounds like Antheil and no one else, and why this stuff is not better known is anybody's guess. Maybe the world's just gone stupid. Antheil occupies a very unique sound world--I think for example of the weird Scherzo of the Fourth. Imagine something as unlikely as Kurt Weill and Richard Rodgers (in "Victory at Sea" mode) trying to rewrite the Bewegung movement from Mahler's Second.

Antheil's later style is uniquely kaleidoscopic, evolving as it did from his fragmented and almost minimalist approach to composition from his early radical years. He shouldn't be sitting on the sidelines--instead he should be getting serious attention. The Fourth Symphony, a phenomenal work, in particular still needs that perfect performance to get itself across to listeners. I've loved it since I was a kid and I'm still not the least bit tired of it--it's kind of the very American answer to the "Leningrad" symphony. The Fifth is an absolute hoot from top to bottom. It's loads of fun and really upbeat in the outer movements and often the writing is dazzling. Antheil never seems to run out of great ideas.

The ballet and Archipelago are not the strongest bits of Antheil I've known but they aren't pale copies of someone elses work either. I still enjoy them and perhaps better than equivalent pieces by Milhaud and Ibert. Antheil's jazziness is more sincere.

To touch on the "controversy" one more time, if anyone can find anything "Russkie" about the Fifth then they're hallucinating. The finale does interpolate the ending of Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony. There are probably a few other subtle quotations. This piece was written to celebrate the end of the Second World War. Just put two and two together--Antheil and the Russians were the only ones on this side of the conflict writing war symphonies.

I am afraid I cannot muster much enthusiasm for the late symphonies of George Antheil.

In the last pages of his autobiography "Bad Boy of Music", written in 1945, Antheil announces that he is composing a 5th Symphony (his fourth had recently been successfully premiered by Stokowski, signalling a positive turn of fortunes for the composer) that is planned as a memorial for his younger brother "and all those who, too young, have had to die in this great war" - "a requiemlike symphony", he calls it. "In this symphony I have put, without shame, all of my tears, my anger. It is the best music of which I have been, so far, capable".

But apparently he finally wasn't satisfied with the result, and went on to compose another symphony, which he numbered again the "Fifth", subtitling it "The Joyous" - and this is the one we get on this Centaur disc, recorded in 1995.

Antheil's fine craftsmanship is undeniable. The outer movements are two dazzling orchestral etudes, displaying relentless forward momentum, colorful orchestration and a "joy" that is really boisterously sardonic humor, bringing to mind the early works of Shostakovich. They frame an "Adagio molto" mostly couched in a nostalgic Coplandesque prairie-style.

The problem to me lies not only in the fact that the language of Antheil's late symphonies (the same holds true with the 3rd, 4th and 6th - see my reviews of George Antheil: Symphony No. 3 "American", George Antheil: Symphonies 1 & 6 and George Antheil ~ Symphony 4 / Morton Gould ~ Spirituals for Orchestra) has become so conservative (in those years Schuman had written his sixth Symphony, Sessions his second and Carter his first) and that they recall so much the style of other composers, to the point sometimes of direct borrowings (indeed the finale of this one is an elaboration on a characteristic theme consisting of four alternatively rising and descending intervals, in which I hear a transformation of the opening theme of Shostakovich's 5th Symphony). After all Antheil had done that with Stravinsky in his early years, but integrated these quotations in a language and approach to form that was uniquely his own (see my reviews of Piano Concertos of the Twenties, George Antheil: Violin Sonatas 1, 2 & 4 and of the first symphony mentioned above). In the same vein, Harold Shapero composed in the same 1948 a "Symphony for Classical Orchestra" which sounds like the symphony Stravinsky could have written just then, and it is still as enjoyable as the symphony Stravinsky could have written (see my review of Modern Masters). The problem with Antheil is here that his model is the early Shostakovich: brash, brilliant, but not much under that surface. Furthermore, for all his agonizing concern with mastering "the form", what Antheil does not have which all the other symphonic writers of the era (Copland, Barber, Piston, Schuman, Mennin, Sessions, Carter...) do, is a sense of the architecture of tension and repose. With Antheil, the two "fast" movements are just tension: in the character of symphonic etudes rather than symphony movements, they just dash forward, brilliant, but ultimately hollow. In that sense, the young braggadocio Antheil still lurks close to the surface of the more "mature" one. I can see how the Fifth Symphony would have attracted audience claps and critics approval when it was premiered by the Eugene Ormandy in the Philadelphia back in December 1948 (at least, Antheil stood out from about all the other major symphonies composed in those years; remember: Bernstein's 2nd Symphony "The Age of Anxiety" dates from 1949, and the subtitle says it all), but today? The composers mentioned here above have offered so many better works! For what Antheil has to offer that is uniquely his own, go to his early works, those composed between 1919 and 1925.

The 1953 ballet "Capital of the World" is set after a Hemingway sarcastically sinister short story about a failed bull fighter in Madrid. When it doesn't directly recall Manuel de Falla's "El Amor Brujo" or "The Three-Cornered Hat", the music evokes what Auric or Sauguet or Milhaud might have (and for all I know may have) composed for some "Spanish Ballet" commissioned by Diaghilev in the 1920s. I find again that the pleasure it elicits is rather hollow and short-lived. I rather prefer the complete ballet played here to the suite played by Hugh Wolff (on the same disc with the 3rd Symphony), which is not just a collection of excerpts but an elaboration of some of the ballet's material into a fast-slow-fast symphonic shape. The complete thing is more descriptive, episodic and rambling, but at least single ideas aren't harped upon to the point where their triteness becomes obtrusive.

"Archipelago", "a folio of South American and Antilles music", was composed in Cagnes (French Riviera) in 1933, after the rumba rhythm had begun to strike Antheil's fancy. Some of it sounds so much like Milhaud's "Boeuf sur le toît" as to be embarrassing. Here Kolman's reading (which is otherwise fittingly dynamic) is more heavy-handed than Wolff's (with Symphony 1 & 6) but he makes more of the more "young Antheil" dissonant passages (4:45).

As useful as it is to get a complete picture of the "Bad Boy of Music", I'd recommend this disc only to Antheil completists such as myself, and to those who revel in flashy, hollow orchestral showpieces such as Khachaturian's Sabre Dance.

I can't fault the playing of the musicians or the production of this album. But I can fault the music itself, which is little short of plagarism: Capital of the World is a pale imitation of Ibert (Ports of Call), The Fifth Symphony shamelessly rips off Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony (with just a smidgen of Shostakovich), and Archipelago is a blatant copy of Milhaud's Le Bouef sur le Toit. Save your money for the originals.