Antheil: Ballet mécanique; Serenade for Strings; Symphony for Five Instruments; Concert for Chamber Orchestra

COMPOSERS: Antheil
LABELS: Naxos
WORKS: Ballet mécanique; Serenade for Strings; Symphony for Five Instruments; Concert for Chamber Orchestra
PERFORMER: Philadelphia Virtuosi CO/Daniel Spalding
CATALOGUE NO: 8.559060

This addition to Naxos’s burgeoning ‘American Classics’ series features George Antheil’s Ballet mécanique, which, with its relentlessly propulsive writing for multiple pianos and percussion (including electric bells and aeroplane propellors), created a truly Parisian scandal at its first performance in 1926. Daniel Spalding directs his accomplished Philadelphia ensemble in a clear, tight performance of Antheil’s more practical but much tamer revised version of 1953, bringing out the work’s affinities with Stravinsky’s Les noces, but not quite explaining what all the fuss was about: that is better conveyed by Maurice Peress’s reconstruction of the original score on MusicMasters. The Ballet is complemented by a Symphony for Five Instruments written when Antheil had just arrived in Paris and was getting to grips with Stravinsky and Milhaud, a 1932 concerto for wind octet, which shuffles discontinuous fragments frenetically and engagingly until finally running out of energy, and a postwar Serenade for Strings, tuneful but less original. The recording (made in Antheil’s home town, Trenton, New Jersey) is excellent; the booklet has a witty cover picture, and Joshua Cheek’s notes are both helpful and funny, as with his comment that the coda of the Serenade ‘sounds as if Shostakovich had gone to a barn-dance’. Anthony Burton