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Bad Boy's Piano Music
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| George Antheil has been having a healthy resurgence of interests with performances of his magnum opus Ballet mechanique with Dennis Russell Davies in New York recently and one expected San Francisco with Michael Tilson Thomas . Antheil's musical gifts here was he caught the negativity of the age, the transitional period between the Wars,when national hatreds and opposing ideologies began festering in the hearts of men,he was labeled by the French, the Futurist pianist when he gave his solo concerts there in the Twenties. But the Futurists were not a bunch I would like to be associated with in light of their Fascists affiliations.Antheil was smart enough never to have written music with such odious overtones yet his music certainly captured this dark page in politics.Needless to say these concerts were accompanied with riots and verbal slinging,if not open violence. Antheil in retrospect is a fascinating bad boy musically for having utilized such innovations for his time as chord clusters, exlpoiting the extremes of piano sonorities with high register tremoli,bass drum like thuds,glissandi,high dynamic levels,pure texture,the obviously motoric(which the Russians adopted simultaneously Prokofiev and Mosolov) infiltrated with an overwhelming demeanor of anger and brutality, something Edgar Varese also exploited in a quite different way. This disc features all the primary piano works the various Piano Sonatas all written in the Twenties a year apart from each other, the short Jazz Sonata(1922), a romp up the scale in octaves with high syncopation,jerks and jabs. The Third Sonata(1923) is here subtitled "Death of Machines" and the ever popular Second Sonata(1921) "The Airplane",the most widely played of the set. Antheil's musical language is fairly one-dimensional except for him rather than representing himself with one seminal work I think you need to here a few to get the full scale of his creativity. Mechanisms(1923) has fascinating features, a bit more abstract.less graphic than the Sonatas,but not any less compelling .This is one large work about 13 minutes if played slowly with a treatise like content of representing different aspects of motoric or mechanical like gestures. Machines at this time, recall, was like our Silicon Valley today it ,they represented the future of wealth, those who came the United States as Edgar Varese thought he was stepping into the future with the high level of citylife and the conflagrations of street noises, the human condition growing more robotic and inpersonal. Benedikt Koehlen has a fine grasp and control of these fantastically difficult pieces. Their physicalness is enough to be felt aggressivly making an indelible mark. Antheil had an innate gift for length, much of this music is like a small miniature explosion never overspending the time he allows like the Jazz Sonata a mere one and a half minutes. |
ARTISTS
Benedikt Koehlen (piano) |
TRACKS
Fireworks and the Profane Waltzes
The Golden Bird
Second Sonata "The Airplane"
Jazz Sonata (#4)
Mechanisms
Third Sonata "Death of Machines"
Sonata Sauvage
Sonata V
Sonatina 1932 |
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