George Antheil, Bad Boy of Music

George Antheil (Composer), Marthanne Verbit (Performer) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Performer: Marthanne Verbit
• Composer: George Antheil
• Audio CD (October 24, 2006)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Albany Records
• ASIN: B0000049OD
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #307,661 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

George Antheil wrote a fascinating autobiography, Bad Boy of Music, and a lot of "bad boy" music before he settled down to a career as a mainstream film composer. His Ballet mécanique still has a lot of life in it, but most of this piano music is simply dated: nose-thumbing naughty stuff that doesn't convince anymore. Antheil had obviously heard Prokofiev's famous Sonata No. 7 before writing his own Sonata No. 4. You may enjoy the Valentine Waltzes, which find a convincing balance between romance and dissonance. And pianist Marthanne Verbit obviously takes this music more seriously than the rest of us will. --Leslie Gerber

Customer Reviews

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A useful survey of Antheil's piano music - but not always the best readings, April 4, 2007

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Discophage (France) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: George Antheil, Bad Boy of Music (Audio CD)

This well-filled (68:23) CD came out in 1994 and was thus the first in a series that launched a mild but long due revival of interest in the piano music of George Antheil. .

Rather than concentrating on the brash and provocative early Antheil (his piano pieces from the 1920s) like Koehlen (George Antheil: Bad Boy's Piano Music) or Henck (Piano Music by Nancarrow and Antheil), Verbit offers a survey that encompasses his various compositional periods: the earth-conquering modernist is represented by the 1921 "Airplane Sonata", 1922 "Sonata Sauvage" and 1923 "Little Shimmy". Antheil the "post-neo-classic" from the early 30s is featured in the Tango from his opera "Transaltlantic" and, more significantly, in the 20 excerpts out of the 45 short preludes that make up the cycle "La Femme 100 têtes", and the later Antheil is heard in the 1948 4th Sonata and the Valentine Waltzes from 1949.

Verbit is not always interpretively at the top of the competition. In the first movement of the "Airplane Sonata" Antheil instructs to play "as fast as possible" and Verbit isn't quite as fast as Henck and Koehlen, but she is muscular and more cleanly articulated than they are. Her very moderately paced 2nd movement "Andante moderato" lends the music an almost Coplandesque-bluesy character, but almost deprives it of its contour; Henck's more animated tempo seems preferable here. In "Sonata Sauvage" she is muscular, powerful and evocative, but a comparison with Henck and Koehlen shows them in the outer movements to be faster, more electric and hectic, producing more unleashed energy. In the finale despite all the power and din she produces she doesn't quite convey the "xylophonic" impression called for by Antheil, that Koehlen captures. On the other hand her "Little Shimmy" is perfectly judged, at a tempo that's neither too fast nor too slow, sounding like a vaguely nonchalant blues, and she easily scores over the hard-driven Henck and the teutonically heavy Koehlen.

"La Femme 100 têtes" is a wonderfully imaginative cycle of short preludes inspired by a book of engravings by Max Ernst. Its title means literally, in French as in English "The Woman One Hundred Heads" (and not "The Woman with a hundred heads", as Antheil maintains in his autobiography "Bad Boy of Music"), but through a phonetic play on words it can also mean "The Woman without a Head" or "The Woman stubbornly persists". Though in his book Antheil boasts having written 100 of them, he completed apparently only 45. Much of the earlier, hammering Antheil is still present in those short pieces (none is longer than 2 minutes and the shortest zips through in 10 seconds) based on very simple and typically young-Antheil, repetitive melodic/rhythmic cells. Possibly to avoid an impression of monotony Verbit plays only 20, but I find the choice regrettable, as I don't find the cycle monotonous and the pieces that she left aside are as good as those included. Interpretively, Verbit is often atmospheric and she finds fine colors, but she also often favors slow tempos at the expense of some snap and piquancy (as in Nr. 1 "Thoughtfully, not too slow", 3 "Faintly energetic", 7 "Sad") or even of a sense of frenzy (5 "furioso", 12 "Brilliant clean" where her articulation lacks clarity). On the other hand she has plenty of muscle in 8 "Electrical (spiccato)", 10 ("Slightly brutal tempo"), 11 ("Bawdy ferocious tempo"), 25 ("Minuet?"), 26 ("Onward Christian Soldiers") and 44 ("Cruel (Quick)"). Still, it is better to have the complete cycle, and Benedikt Koehlen plays it excellently (see my review of Piano Pictures: Satie Sports & Divertissements / Antheil La Femme 100 têtes).

In the 4th sonata the pounding Antheil is still there but whereas the pounding in the early works was mechanistically devoid of emotion (other than the joy of making such a racket), by 1948 you can feel the anger and bitterness of the composer who failed to live up to his early promises. With its motoric rhythms in the outer movements and bitter-sweet harmonies and terse counterpoint in the middle "Andante Cantabile", the sonata is in fact strikingly reminiscent of Prokofiev's War Sonatas - a feature I had already remarked with the contemporary 4th Violin and Piano Sonata (see my review of George Antheil: Violin Sonatas 1, 2 & 4) - and it is hard to believe that the Toccata-like finale wasn't inspired by the Finale of Prokofiev's 7th. Strange how Antheil went from one Russian to the other - from the Stravinsky quotations of the 1920s to the Prokofiev similitudes of the 1940s. The Sonata's 1st movement also has a secondary motive that is a mock imitation of a trite early Chopin run - Antheil's iconoclastic sense of humor is still there. Verbit is more hectic and energetic than Guy Livingston (George Antheil: The Lost Sonatas) and Eric Parkin (on a 1987 Preamble CD of American Piano Music Vol.1, with works of Barber, Copland, Gershwin, Stevens and Waxman), but also, in the first movement, not as clearly articulated. As a result, for all of Verbit's impressive power, it is Parkin that brings out better the Prokofiev-like march rhythms and kinetic energy and Livingston its neo-classical "stravinskysms".

The intimate Valentine Waltzes weren't destined for publication. Don't expect much: they are walzes, period. Their apparent triteness, wry humor and emotional restraint recalls Satie, a musician Antheil much admired, and I also hear some Brahms in the 4th. It is not the most significant Antheil, but Verbit's is the only recording, so she very much has the field to herself here.

In sum this is a useful overview of Antheil's various compositional styles but not as interesting as Livingston's program. It is also not the disc I would recommend if you have only one CD of the piano music of Antheil: go instead to Koehlen's Col Legno collection of the early pieces, and if you enjoy it as much as I do, complete it with Koehlen's "Femme 100 têtes", then Livingston.