If literature has its American expatriates living in Paris after World War I – like Hemingway, Pound, and Fitzgerald – music has George Antheil (1900-1959), the “bad boy” of classical music who made futurism a seminal aspect of his musical development between 1922-1925. The collection of string works assembled by the Del Sol Quartet range from 1919-1948, and they embrace a diversity of styles, ranging from the impressionistic classicism of Ravel to the strict 12-tone serialism advocated by the Schoenberg school.
The program opens with Lithuanian Night, two short pieces suggestive of Ernest Bloch, the first Hebraic and nocturnal, the second a motor piece clearly indebted to Stravinsky’s Petrushka. Paul Hindemith, then of the Amar Quartet, commissioned Antheil to write what became his one-movement First Quartet (1925), interrupting Antheil’s work on Ballet Mecanique. Set as a kind of rondo, the First Quartet has a kinship with Debussy’s Jeux, only more angularly modal and overtly dissonant. Yet the shifting, abstractly mercurial music communicates a lyrical melancholy that remains quite approachable, especially in the cello line. Doubtless, Antheil exploits an eeriness in his sonic syntax that still manages to unnerve us. The jagged, insistent lines achieve the same haunted intrusiveness we find in Bartok or Martinu. “My ear is only a photographic apparatus of the times,” quipped Antheil.
The 1927 Second Quartet (dedicated to Sylvia Beach of the famous Paris bookshop) has neo-classic ambitions, even to including a dazzling fugue after a series of riffs in metric shifts from 9/8, 12/8, and 6/8, organized along Beethoven’s principles in the late quartets. Pizzicati, ostinati, musical buzzings are rife, but the melodic content of the music flows above the restless ingredients. A stunning, downward spiral of chords takes us back to the expository material, but now presented in bravura fashion not far from the virtuosity we find in Dvorak. The cello carries the arioso Lento movement’s opening tune, extended by the first violin. Just as mercurial is the expansive Rondino scherzino–Allegro vivace, although its constant shifts manage a declamation or two over a march tempo in the Bartok tradition. A wisp of a Presto concludes the work, a kind of ensemble cadenza, reminiscent n its bravura of the end of Chopin’s Second Sonata. The Six Pieces for Strong Quartet (1931) are character sketches of musical personalities–like J. P. McEvoy and Leon Barzin–in Antheil’s life between the French Riviera and Woodstock, New York. Some of the pieces imitate the pulverized style of Webern, others a smattering from Satie and Milhaud.
The Third Quartet (1948) captures the neoromantic evolution in Antheil’s style, a dimension of his persona nurtured by Hollywood’s use of his talents for film music, often as extensions of Americana. So, the Third Quartet plays like Dvorak‚s American Quartet or aspects of Charles Ives, providing a medley of American folk and patriotic motifs. The first violin, Kate Steinberg, has her concertante work cut out for her as the hoe-down becomes a rich, harmonized song. The Largo is a song with a high tessitura, modal in the style of our old friend, Ernest Bloch and many a passing allusion to Dvorak. A slightly askew waltz for a third movement, hints of Richard Rodgers cross-fertilized by Janacek. The last movement, Allegro giocoso, throws us a buoyant toccata for four strings, A waltz episode intrudes momentarily, only to yield to the hurly-burly of the energized impulse that has the viola lead us to the whirling coda right out of Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony.
— Gary Lemco
