George Antheil: Bad Boy's Piano Music
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CD Details
Composer: George AntheilPerformer: Benedikt Koehlen
Edition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 2000-08-12
Music Label: Col Legno
Soundtracks:
- Fireworks And The Profane Waltzes: Fireworks
- Fireworks And The Profane Waltzes: I. Tempo Di Valse
- Fireworks And The Profane Waltzes: II. Over Sentimental - Exaggerated
- The Golden Bird, After Brancusi
- Second Son 'The Airplane': Lent
- Second Son 'The Airplane': Andante Moderato
- Jazz Son No.4
- Mechanisms: Mechanism Interrhythmic. Languez/Mechanism Cubistic. Moderato/Mechanism Eliptic...
- Third Son 'Death Of Machines'
- (Little) Shimmy
- Son Sauvage: Niggers. Allegro Vivo - Joyeuse Marcato, A La Negre
- Son Sauvage: Snakes. (Lento) - Prestissimo - Lento
- Son Sauvage: Ivory. Moderato - Xylophonic. Prestissimo
- Son V: Mechanistically
- Son: Allegro Marcato
- Son 1932
Music reviews of George Antheil: Bad Boy's Piano Music
Music Review: One of the best recordings of Anheil's piano music and the one to have if you have only one
Rating: 5 Stars
Though released by Col Legno in 1995, this Antheil piano collection was recorded by the Cologne Radio as early as 1989/90, so it must have been a precursor in the long due Antheil rediscovery that took place in the nineties. It was followed by recordings by Marthanne Verbit (Albany, 1994: George Antheil, Bad Boy of Music), Herbert Henck (ECM, 1999: Piano Music by Nancarrow and Antheil) and Guy Livingston (Wergo George Antheil: The Lost Sonatas). Of all these, Koehlen remains one of the best.
First, it is a fairly thorough survey, at least of Antheil's piano works from the 1920s - his most innovative and daring period. Left out are the marvelous cycle of short preludes "La Femme 100 Tête" written in the early 30s - which Koelen has recorded complete on another Col Legno CD (Piano Pictures: Satie Sports & Divertissements / Antheil La Femme 100 têtes) - and the compositions from Antheil's Hollywood period that are included in the collections of Verbit and Livingston. But among the pieces included are the 1919 "Fireworks and the Profane Waltzes" (Fireworks is especially dazzling) and the mesmerizing 1921 "The Golden Bird, after Brancusi"; all these pieces date from before Antheil's departure for Europe, and to my knowledge Koehlen's is still as of today the only recording, which makes it invaluable. His is also, I believe, the only recording of the short 1922/3 Sonata V (one of the three 5th Sonatas Antheil composed! His music was rarely published and his manuscripts are apparently in a state of shambles), a kind of ragtime with a medley of tunes from Stravinsky's Soldier Tale and Sacre to Fuiculi-funiculà. The disc is, roughly, chronologically ordered.
Comparison with Henck, Verbit and various others shows Koehlen's to be an excellent interpretation, often the best. He isn't entirely successful throughout, though. In the 1922 "Jazz Sonata" Antheil instructs to play "as rapidly as it is possible to execute cleanly and with even touch and dynamics like a player piano", but Koehlen (like Henck) appears to have read the instruction only as far as the word "possible". The impression is less of a mechanical player piano than that of a frenzied, demented ragtime bringing to the dancers collapse. In the "Airplane Sonata" (1921) Antheil instructs to take the 1st movement "as fast as possible" and Koelen is here appropriately hectic, but like Verbit he takes the 2nd movement "Andante moderato" at a very moderate tempo indeed, which deprives the movement of much sense of shape; Henck's faster tempo is more effective here. Koehlen's "Little Shimmy" is teutonically slow and ponderous, and the nice bluesy flavor that Verbit and Steffen Schleiermacher (in his Music at the Bauhaus collection on MDG) capture so well is lost in the process.
On the other hand, in the Sonata "Death of the Machines" Koehlen strikes a fine balance of tempo and clear-cut articulation, neither ludicrously slow as Markus Becker (on a CPO CD of George Antheil: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 & 2; a Jazz Symphony; Jazz Sonata) nor excessively fast as Henck. In the 1923 "Sonate Sauvage" he has plenty of savagery and power, and his 1932 "Sonatina for Radio" is Gershwinesque it its merry agitation.
"Mechanism" is an extraordinary piece, an 8-movement Sonata that, for once, rarely pounds, but plays instead on mysterious chordal resonances that are evocative of some of Messiaen's "20 Regards sur l'Enfant Jesus". As the title of the last movement indicates ("Mechanism planetary" - adagio), it is, as with Messiaen, music of the celestial spheres. Koehlen plays them with a fine sense of atmosphere, although his slow tempo and "time-suspended" approach sometimes threatens to dissolve the music's shape. At a more animated tempo Henck presents a valid alternative. Livingston plays an abridged version of the same work, under the title "Woman Sonata".
The liner notes in their English version appear to be long on the composer's biography but short on information about the compositions themselves: this is only because they omit to translate the last 3 pages of the thorough and fascinating German original notes. A shame. With a total time of 52:31 there was ample space on the disc to add compositions from Antheil's later period. But still, as it is, this is the CD of Antheil's piano compositions that I recommend if you have only one - but the music is so good, it deserves to be complemented with Koehlen's recording of "La Femme 100 Têtes" and possibly Livingston's collection.
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