March 27, 2019

  • Symphonies from America's Troubled "Bad Boy"

     

    Antheil: Symphony Nos. 3 & 6
    BBC Philharmonic/John Storgards
    Chandos 10982
    Total Time:  66:52
    Recording:   ****/****
    Performance: ****/****

    Being first is sometimes not always best.  At least, that was the case for the American modernist George Antheil (1900-1959).  The composer was among the first that headed to Paris’ art scene for a career as a concert pianist and gained notoriety for his blends of jazz and modern compositional techniques.  He would program his own pieces as well as those of Schoenberg.  The premiere of his Ballet Mecanique was a sensation in Paris but fell very flat when it was performed at Carnegie Hall (a fate that was not unlike that Copland faced with his first modernist works).  Antheil eventually would shift his aesthetic to explore some of the Americana directions of the 1930s and recapture a sense of the New Romantic trends of composers as well but his reputation tended to have been cemented by that earlier performance.  He would head to Hollywood and support his serious composition by writing film scores (The Buccaneers, The Fighting Kentuckian, Spectre of the Rose, The Pride and the Passion) and stock music for B pictures.  This is the second album of music in a series featuring the BBC Philharmonic under conductor John Storgards which explores these two contrasting stylistic approaches in the third and sixth symphonies along with some delightful fillers.

    The filler pieces are used as framing breaks for the two larger works here and are orchestral dances lying more in the popular realm of music.  The album opens with the delightful rumba Archipelago (1935).  Here he explores the sort of Latin rhythms that would also invigorate other composer’s music such as Milhaud (whose style seems to be closest) and Copland.  Mostly as a means to gain more popular appeal.  The piece here is certainly worthy of resurrection for pops concerts at the very least.  It would later be reworked into the composer’s second symphony.  The Boston Pops actually was one of the orchestras that first performed his Hot-Time Dance (1948), which is a reference to dancing around a bonfire on election night and not a jazz work as might be first thought from the title.  It has a quite Prokofiev-ian quality.  The album concludes with one of the composer’s more popular, and stunning, Ravel-informed waltz from the 1946 film noir Spectre of the Rose.

    Antheil wrote six numbered symphonies (though the second one was withdrawn).  While his third, written between 1936-41 and revised in 1946, bears the subtitle “American” it is like an extension of his earlier jazz modernist works.  This is somewhat the case in the rhythmic ideas and brass lines that appear in the opening movement.  As Antheil conceived the piece, he was thinking of it as a sort of exploration of the American landscape and so this first movement begins in the bustling metropolis of New York City.  The second movement is the slow movement with a march idea that serves as a second concept to explore.  This is a rather lyrical movement that feels the most picturesque.  It does have the sort of Americana filmic quality that would appear much later in the work of Rosenman or Leonard Bernstein’s own film scores, with maybe just a touch of Copland.  The composer’s own struggle of trying to pull together this work begins to appear as the final two movements bear subtitles (earlier movements also had them but were not included in the final score).  The scherzo, called “The Golden Spike”, was the only part of the symphony to be performed in his lifetime.  He adapted music from his rejected score to Union Pacific (1939) for this movement.   The final movement has a style that feels like a blend of Prokofiev and Revueltas.  As individual movements the piece is interesting but it tends to feel more like a suite of loosely-connected parts.  That said, the performance here is excellent with crisp articulation and a good sense of energy throughout.

    If one really wants to explore Antheil’s later symphonic work the place to really start is his superb fourth symphony.  This work was instrumental in his music gaining broader concert performances given extra weight by its premiere under Leopold Stokowski.  Pierre Monteux would premiere the Symphony No. 6 (1947-48; 1949-50) with the San Francisco Symphony in 1949.  The subtitle “after Delacroix” provides us with a window into the composer searching for inspiration to connect with audiences.  In this case, it was the painters famous Liberty Leading the People (1830).  This movement began work though as an overture and is repurposed here.  The connections to Delacroix dissipate almost as quickly as they begin.  The slow second movement seems to recall Prokofiev’s fifth symphony.  The third is structured as a rondo.  Antheil’s final movement intends to bring us to a sense of joyousness and hopefulness that also seems to mimic Prokofiev’s fifth symphony (one wonders if he was working through at some level his own unique responses).  The piece has a dramatic quality that feels steeped in mid-century Hollywood scoring like a Max Steiner score.  The music though does demonstrate Antheil’s deft orchestral style that runs parallel here more with Shostakovich perhaps with a sense of Ives as it switches gears suddenly from time to time.

    Hugh Wolff conducted these pieces for the CPO label in his survey of Antheil’s music.  Storgards’s performances are equally captivating opportunities to explore this music and are presented in stellar sound to boot.  What is always fascinating in Antheil’s music is the sense of drama that it contains and its always decidedly American feel.  While the composer may have always been trying to shirk away from his early moniker as the “Bad Boy of Music” it tended to leave him more unsure of his own abilities.  But, that said, his music can be an interesting experience that is always engaging due to its rhythmic inventiveness even if it seems to switch gears more than one might expect.  One does wonder if these symphonies might have had a different feel if they could have been expanded beyond their not quite 25-minute play time.  This would have allowed Antheil a chance to really expand his ideas and create the sort of transcendent work that Shostakovich was afforded.  If anything, it is a painful reminder of how American composers on the fringes of popularity had to work within more restricted settings.  There is a lot of wonderful music to explore here and well worth the time for those who are willing to enter into Antheil’s world.