A New Naxos Album of Antheil Violin Sonatas

Tianwa Yang and Nicholas Rimmer on the cover of their new Antheil album (courtesy of A440 Arts)

This coming Friday Naxos will release a new album of the four sonatas for violin and piano composed by George Antheil. A cursory Amazon search revealed there have been a generous number of recordings of this repertoire. This latest offering was recorded in Berlin in 2021 by violinist Tianwa Yang and pianist Nicholas Rimmer (who doubles on drums for the second sonata). As is usually the case, Amazon.com has created a Web page for those wishing to preorder this new offering.

Like just about everyone else, Frank K. DeWald cited Antheil’s autobiography Bad Boy of Music in the booklet notes. I find it a bit ironic that it is not particularly easy to come across a copy of this book through an Amazon search. Personally, I would recommend Antheil’s Wikipedia page, which provides more than adequate breadth without going to far where depth is concerned. Furthermore, I get a kick out of the section on that Wikipedia page under the header “Frequency-hopping spread-spectrum invention.” This involves U.S. Patent 2,292,387, which was granted to Antheil and his inventor-colleague Hedy Kiesler Markey, better known as the actress Hedy Lamarr. (Ironically, this patent had more impact on the Internet than it did on radio-controlled torpedos during World War II. Indeed, the patent expired in 1962, long before the first plans for the Internet were documented.)

Where Antheil’s violin sonatas are concerned, I doubt that today’s listeners would find any of them outrageous, no different from how listeners came to enjoy Igor Stravinsky’s ballet score for “The Rite of Spring” (with a little help from Fantasia). What puzzled me a bit was that DeWald made only a passing reference to Béla Bartók (for his “Allegro barbaro”) but failed to recognize that the third sonata included one of the folk tunes that Bartók collected during his ethnomusicological research with Zoltán Kodály.

That said, the notes being played by the two performers are more important than any of the notes taken in the course of scholarly research. My personal feeling is that Antheil approached each of these four sonatas with an unabashed sense of play. Both Yang and Rimmer performed as if they were determined to bring that sense of the play to every attentive listener, whether it involved blatant quotation or just raucous rhetoric. DeWald did call out the “sort of musical, Ivesian collage,” which is particularly evident in the second sonata. However, I came away wondering if he had taken a microscope to each of the four scores, while Yang and Rimmer were more interested in engaging listener attention.

Chandos Releases its Third Antheil Album

courtesy of Naxos of America

Readers that have been following this site for a few years probably know by now that the British Chandos label is in the midst of a major project to record the orchestral music of George Antheil. The orchestra for this project is the BBC Philharmonic conducted by John Storgårds. Coverage of this project began in May of 2017 following the release of an album of two of Antheil’s symphonies, the fourth (“1942”) and the fifth (“Joyous”), along with the world premiere recording of “Over the Plains,” a rather loopy concert overture with ample references to familiar tunes. Exactly a year ago today, I wrote my account of the second volume, which was organized around two more symphonies, the third (“American”) and sixth (“after Delacroix”), along with three shorter offerings.

The third album was released this past November, but it took a while for it to work its way to the head of my queue. This recording presents only one symphony, the first, which was given the subtitle “Zingareska” (gypsy-like). That subtitle is more than a little perplexing, particularly since the last of the four movements has a title of its own, which is “Ragtime.” Furthermore, the booklet notes by Mervyn Cooke observe that this movement, along with the second, seems more in the spirit of circus music, rather than that of either the jazzmen of the time (the symphony was composed between 1920 and 1922) or gypsies. Nevertheless, those familiar with Antheil’s approaches to making music will probably not be surprised by such idiosyncrasies.

The other major work on the album is the suite that Antheil extracted from the score he composed for the ballet “Capital of the World.” The ballet is based on a short story by Ernest Hemingway about Paco, working as a waiter’s apprentice with aspirations of becoming a matador. He experiments with his moves by having a colleague charge him with a wooden chair, taking the upper two legs to be the horns of a bull. A cynical customer observes that the exercise would be more realistic if a pair of knives were strapped to those legs. Paco accepts the challenge, is stabbed, and dies. Hemingway’s friend A. E. Hotchner turned this story into a ballet scenario, which was then choreographed by Eugene Loring for Lucia Chase’s Ballet Theatre. It was also televised on Omnibus when I was a kid, and that was my only contact with the ballet. Sadly, neither Cooke’s booklet notes nor the track listings give much of a clue of the relationship between the music in the suite and the action of the choreography.

Once again, these lengthier offerings are complemented by shorter ones. “McKonkey’s Ferry” is named after the site on the Delaware River where General George Washington led his forces across the river, where they would attack the Hessian mercenaries garrisoned in Trenton. Antheil had a knack for vigorous rhetoric consistent with patriotic spirits, and “McKonkey’s Ferry” never lets that rhetoric descend into jingoism. “The Golden Bird” was originally composed for solo piano in 1921. It amounted to a tone poem based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Nightingale,” one of the earliest stories of a competition between real life and a mechanical simulacrum. Antheil orchestrated his score not long after completing the piano version. “Nocturne in Skyrockets” also amounts to a tone poem, based this time on images of fireworks rather than on a narrative.

Once again, Storgårds brings an informed hand to leading the BBC musicians. There is a consistently clean sense of balance across the diverse instrumental resources that Antheil’s scores require. This composer never achieved particularly adequate recognition for his orchestral music during his lifetime. (He was better known as the man who titled his autobiography The Bad Boy of Music.) Storgårds deserves credit for getting beyond provocative reputation and making a case that Antheil’s music deserves attentive listening.

Chandos Continues its Antheil Recording Project

In May of 2017, the British Chandos label released an album of the music of George Antheil that promised to be the beginning of a major project to record Antheil’s works. John Storgårds conducted the BBC Philharmonic in performances of two of Antheil’s symphonies, the fourth (“1942”) and the fifth (“Joyous”), along with the world premiere recording of “Over the Plains,” a rather loopy concert overture with ample references to familiar tunes. Antheil liked to refer to himself as a “bad boy;” and the music on this album definitely situates him at a significant distance from both Aaron Copland and Charles Ives (who are, themselves, separated by a considerable distance). However, in writing about Antheil’s music, the description that seemed most appropriate was “joyously raucous.”

At the beginning of this month, Chandos released its second volume in this project. Taking an “inside out” approach, Storgårds leads the BBC Philharmonic in two more symphonies, the third (“American”) and sixth (“after Delacroix”). The sixth was Antheil’s last, but that does not mean that two symphonies remain to be recorded. There is an unnumbered symphony in F, which Antheil begin in the same year that George Gershwin also wrote his concerto in F (with no qualifier for major or minor). Furthermore, the “Joyous” symphony is one of two bearing the number five, the other having the title “Tragic.” Storgårds definitely has his work cut out for him!

The second volume also presents three shorter offerings. This time it opens with the concert overture genre in the form of “Archipelago.” This is a rhumba that was originally the third movement of the second symphony. The album concludes with the “Spectre of the Rose Waltz,” a concert version of music that Antheil wrote for the 1946 film Spectre of the Rose about a homicidal male ballet dancer. The two symphonies are separated by “Hot-Time Dance,” a movement extracted from American Dance Suite No. 1, where it was called “Election Dance.” (Grove Music Online makes no mention of a Dance Suite No. 2!)

The prevailing rhetoric across the entire album is again “joyously raucous.” References to familiar thematic material come and go, but Antheil is never as extensive in his cross-references as Ives ever was. Indeed, I was somewhat amused to discover that the Spectre of the Rose music had much more to do with Jean Sibelius, the “Valse triste” movement from his Opus 44 incidental music for Arvid Järnefelt's 1903 play Kuolema (death), along with a nod or two to Maurice Ravel’s “La Valse,” than Carl Maria von Weber, whose “Invitation to the Dance” served as the score for Michel Fokine’ ballet “Le Spectre de la rose.”

The title of the sixth symphony applies, strictly speaking, only to its first movement, which was inspired by Eugène Delacroix’ famous painting, Liberty Leading the People:

Liberty Leading the People (painted by Eugène Delacroix in 1830, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

To my ears there is nothing particularly French about Antheil’s score. On the other hand there is a somewhat distorted account of the “Battle Cry of Freedom” (also known as “Rally ’Round the Flag”), which would not have been out of place in one of Ives’ scores. This song was written by George Frederick Root during the American Civil War in 1862, but it definitely offers words to consider while looking at Delacroix’ painting.

It is unclear how Storgårds’ project will progress following this second release. The fact that it includes excerpts from longer works suggests that he is not systematically working his way through the list of orchestral works cataloged on Grove Music Online. Indeed, I found it a bit odd that he did not present the two “fifth symphonies” on a single album. Nevertheless, Antheil’s music continues to be so under-represented that I am very likely to follow Storgårds’ releases in whatever direction they may lead.

Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil: People Still Prefer Legends

Hedy Lamarr (courtesy of Larsen Associates)

Readers of this site probably know that, when I write about composer George Antheil, I find it hard to resist making two observations. The first is that he used the title of his autobiography to proclaim himself the “bad boy” of music; and the second is that he collaborated with Hollywood film star Hedy Lamarr to write a patent application that was approved for filing. Lamarr’s contribution had to do with an approach to encryption known as frequency-hopping; and Antheil demonstrated how it could be implemented by synchronizing devices reading punched paper tape.

We know the source of Antheil’s contribution. He had already composed music to accompany the silent film “Ballet Méchanique;” and his instrumentation required (among many other things) sixteen synchronized player pianos. What about Lamarr?

Alexandra Dean’s film BOMBSHELL: The Hedy Lamarr Story has much to say about the significance of frequency-hopping and the critical role it plays in implementing the “mass connectivity” that is now so predominant in the world as we now know it. However, there apparently was not much of a documentary record available to Dean when it came to trying to account for that “Aha!” experience that triggered her discovery. There are some interesting graphics that illustrate the idea itself, but the film never quite manages to situate that idea in a narrative context.

The result is that the discovery itself ultimately gets buried under the far stronger narrative of Lamarr’s life story. Mind you, that story almost has a stranger-than-fiction quality about it; and much of it feels like a roller coaster ride with “Hollywood culture” as the roller coaster itself. The ups and downs of Lamarr’s life run to such extremes that the viewer is left dazzled by the fact that a woman who escaped Adolf Hitler was never quite as successful with Louis B. Mayer.

Perhaps Lamarr and Antheil were so successful as intellectual partners because they both knew how to march to the beat of their own respective drummers. The difference is that, over a century after his birth, Antheil is still very much “on the sidelines” where concert programming is concerned. On the other hand, while Lamarr had to endure the slings and arrows of an outrageously inaccurate ghost-written “autobiography;” she at least made an impressive number of films that deserve to be remembered.

The problem (at least for the few of us left with an interest in the history of technology or, for that matter, any other history) is that her success as an actress (and the decline she endured after her best films faded into the past) has almost entirely overshadowed her contributions as an inventor. Thus, while Dean claimed that she made BOMBSHELL because “there are so few role models for women in science and technology” (her words from an interview with her producer, Adam Haggiag), it is unclear what the film offers by way of a role model. BOMBSHELL was apparently made for the American Masters series on PBS. Sadly, too much of what passes for content on PBS these days has somewhat of a CliffsNotes feel to it; and just-so-stories that skim the surface do not always serve that well in providing role models.

Back when I was a computer professional, I had several occasions to hear talks by Grace Hopper. Hopper was actively present in the creation of many of the fundamental building blocks of programming techniques and software artifacts. Furthermore, her skill as a speaker was so well-crafted that it was hard not to enjoy listening to her a second time, even if the words were almost entirely the same as they had been the first time. Her reputation was so formidable that the Association for Computing Machinery named one of its awards after her.

It named another award after Alan Turing, who has now been portrayed by the likes of both Derek Jacobi and Benedict Cumberbatch. Watching Linda Hunt on television, I often think of how much of Hopper’s character lurks in her portrayal of Henrietta Lange. Hopper is decidedly a character worth considering as a role model!

BOMBSHELL: The Hedy Lamarr Story will open this Friday, March 9, at the Clay Theatre at 2261 Fillmore Street, on the southwest corner of Clay Street. The first screening will be at 2:40 p.m. Dean will be present for a Q&A session with the audience following the 7 p.m. screening. Other screenings will be at 4:50 p.m. and 9:40 p.m.

Music Takes a Back Seat at This Week’s SFS Concert

The title of this week’s concert by the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) at Davies Symphony Hall, which received its first performance last night, is Music for a Modern Age. It is unclear just what that meant, since the music on the program spanned an entire century, from 1906 (Charles Ives’ “From the Steeples and the Mountains”) to 2016, the West Coast premiere of the setting by conductor Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) of Carl Sandburg’s poem “Four Preludes on Playthings of the World.” Furthermore, to add to the confusion over just what, if anything, the overall theme was, this was one of those evenings dominated by projection screens, stage directors, and choreography. Those who came to listen to the music quickly found themselves in the center of a massive battle for attention.

Regardless of any of the intentions behind the overall programming, the winner of that battle would have to be director and choreographer Patricia Birch. Her life span may not be as wide as last night’s repertoire (her Wikipedia page does not give her date of birth); but she was in the original production of West Side Story. By 1975 her resume included choreography for You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, Grease, and A Little Night Music. A high point of her past work with MTT and SFS was the full-evening show The Thomashefskys: Music and Memories of a Life in the Yiddish Theatre.

Last night she closed out the evening with a staging of George Antheil’s “A Jazz Symphony,” which she developed with MTT. This was the major composition on a recent recording discussed on this site this past Thursday. It would be fair to say that Antheil’s music was neither jazz nor a symphony; but it may be the most musical reflection on that cultural milieu known as “The Jazz Age” conceived by a composer. Birch cooked up a series of dynamite dance routines focused on a pair of flappers (Kiva Dawson and Erin Moore); and both music and dance were embedded in some highly imaginative video work by Clyde Scott.

Since Birch was experienced in working with the Davies stage, she knew how she could use the space to best advantage. However, where theatre directors often achieve their most striking results when they break down that “fourth wall” (separating the audience from the stage), Birch used the raucous qualities of Antheil’s music as inspiration to break down the wall around the musicians. Thus we had Dawson flirting with solo pianist Peter Dugan (sometimes in ways making one wonder how he was still able to execute all of Antheil’s demands):

courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony

More impressive was how Moore took the four players at the rear of the first violin section and turned them into her “supporting chorus,” teaching them their moves and then parading them to different areas of the stage. (The empty chairs were quickly replaced by four other violinists. Antheil’s piece requires a very large ensemble; and the first violin section needed to maintain its balance.)

The whole affair was a delightfully memorable hoot, unless you were there to listen to Antheil’s music. As was discussed earlier this week, there is no shortage of wit in the composer’s score. Some of it was quickly apparent, particularly in some of Dugan’s solo work (before he became distracted). However, there are no end of playful devils in the details of this music; and there were just too many demands on attention to give those devils the due they deserved.

Indeed, there were not many opportunities for focus on the pleasures afforded by just listening. The opening Ives selections fared best of all. As in the past, MTT arranged a spatial approach to the performance of “The Unanswered Question.” The strings were stationed in the inner lobby for Orchestra seating, while Mark Inouye took the trumpet solo from the right arm of the uppermost tier. The effect could not have been more stirring; but it was definitely equalled by the four “church-bell” (actually metal plates) players in the terrace during “From the Steeples and the Mountains.” Ives never heard this music performed; but the give-and-take between the bells and a brass choir summoned up all of those concepts of God and Nature that made such a deep impression on the Concord philosophers that the composer so admired.

Similarly, the performance of four of the movements from the suite for violin and American Gamelan composed collaboratively by Lou Harrison and Richard Dee placed priority on the listener. (The “inner suite” of three “Jhala” movements was omitted.) Nadya Tichman performed the violin solo with all of the melodic lyricism that both composers evoked in their score. Sadly, the American Gamelan was not the Old GrandDad collection of instrument designed and constructed by Harrison and his partner William Colvig. Those were the instruments used when the suite was performed in its entirety as part of the Other Minds 22 festival. Last night they were replaced by a more uniform collection of metallophones whose pitches were based on Harrison’s approach to just intonation.

Unfortunately, this made for more uniformity in the accompaniment than had been experienced at Other Minds. Each of the OldGrandDad instruments was made as its own individual piece of work. When a collection of them were assembled, one could appreciate not only the sound of the group but also the contributions of the individual instruments. Last night the only differences one could detect in the accompaniment had to do with register. The resulting disadvantage was that interleaving lines in a single register tended to get muddled, meaning that the listener was less aware of the Javanese spirit that had inspired the score.

However, muddle was a far greater problem with MTT’s composition. There is a discursive prose-like quality to Sandburg’s text that tends to demand a delivery closer to conversation than singing. Michael Hovland’s entry for Grove Music Online offers a moderate list of composers and their settings, but chances are that none of these will be recognized by most readers. (Hovland’s article comes from the second edition of The Grove Dictionary of American Music.) Even with MTT reading the text before the performance and with soprano Measha Brueggergosman singing into a head-mounted microphone, there was no opportunity to get any sense of the relationship between words and music. Perhaps it was just as well that the listener was besieged with five screens of video and a pair of “backup” vocalists (soprano Mikaela Bennett and mezzo Kara Dugan) suggesting that the whole thing was a Supremes act that never made it off the drawing board. (The staging by James Darrah did not make it off the drawing board either.)

The result was an evening of sharply changing variations, but credit must go to Birch for guaranteeing that things ended on a high note.

Capriccio Honors George Antheil’s “Bad Boy” Reputation

At the end of last month, I reported that the British Chandos label had begun a project with the BBC Philharmonic, conducted by John Storgårds, to record the music of American composer George Antheil. I used that article to discuss the composer’s “bad boy” reputation, noting that Antheil himself chose that epithet, using it in the title of his autobiography. I then observed that the new Chandos album had pretty much slighted any of the composer’s “bad boy” qualities.

I am therefore happy to report that, at the beginning of this month, Capriccio released a brand-new (based on recordings made this past January) album that vigorously affirms Antheil’s self-appointed reputation:

courtesy of Naxos of America

The orchestra is the Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz, the leading symphony orchestra of the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate. The ensemble is led by Chief Conductor Karl-Heinz Steffens, who has held that position since the beginning of the 2009/2010 season. The album was co-produced for Capriccio by Deutschlandradio Kultur and Südwestrundfunk (SWR). That is quite a team in support for a composer whose music is seldom performed in his own country.

It does not take long for the listener to appreciate how Antheil acquired his self-professed reputation. The opening selection is “A Jazz Symphony,” which was written in 1925 for a series of concerts organized by Paul Whiteman entitled Experiment in Modern Music. (This was the same concert series that had premiered George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” in Carnegie Hall.)

Whiteman never performed the piece. The polite reason is probably that he did not have the resources. Antheil’s instrumentation required two oboes, two clarinets, soprano saxophone, alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, various percussion, two banjos, three pianos (including one soloist), and a full string section. The less polite reason is that Antheil’s writing probably scared the bejesus out of Whiteman. Many of the leading jazz musicians of Whiteman’s day accused him of trying to “make a lady” out of jazz; and that remark was not intended as a compliment! “Rhapsody in Blue” may have found the right sweet spot between the testosterone-laden qualities of Whiteman’s critics and the more polite tastes of Carnegie Hall audiences; but Antheil was far less inclined to compromise. Ironically, the conductor that did perform “A Jazz Symphony” (at Carnegie Hall) was W. C. Handy (who was definitely more in touch with “real jazz” than Whiteman ever was) leading the Harlem Symphonietta.

One might then be justified in asking how well an orchestra in the Rhineland-Palatinate could manage with all the “bad boy” qualities that Antheil packed into this piece. As far as I am concerned, the answer is “Very well, indeed!” Mind you, it helps if the listener has some basic familiarity with “Rhapsody in Blue;” but, thanks to United Airlines, it is hard to find listeners lacking that acquaintance. Of course the reason for that background awareness is not that Antheil appropriated from Gershwin. Quite the contrary, he takes just about every memorable moment that Gershwin concocted and, in true “bad boy” style, turns it on its head. The music amounts to a wildly disruptive romp through “induced expectations;” and chief pianist Frank Dupree was anything but tame in taking on the rhetoric of the solo part.

This is just as much the case on the second track, which is Antheil’s first piano concerto. This was written earlier than “A Jazz Symphony” in 1922, during Antheil’s time in Europe. In many respects this piece is also a romp through how music was being made at the time, particularly in Paris. Appropriations of bits and pieces of Igor Stravinsky keep popping up, and there is a pretty clear sense that Erik Satie is lurking between the cracks. In a similar way it is difficult to listen to the final track, “Archipelago ‘Rhumba’” without thinking of Darius Milhaud. Antheil wrote that piece in 1935, and it is hard to imagine that he had not been exposed to a performance of “Le Bœuf sur le toit” when he was in Paris during the previous decade.

The tamest selection on the album is the orchestral suite that Antheil extracted from his score for Eugene Loring’s ballet “The Capital of the World.” This may be the only ballet based on a short story by Ernest Hemingway, and that may be its only distinguishing feature. It was first performed in December of 1953, and Antheil probably extracted the suite around the same time. If it owes any debt of appropriation, it would be to Manuel de Falla; but Hemingway’s plot never runs as deep as any of the narratives that inspired Falla. Antheil’s score is competent enough; but it comes off sounding as if it had been written “on spec.” In the history of Ballet Theatre relationships with composers, the one that Agnes de Mille had with Aaron Copland is far more memorable.

Chandos Releases a Rollicking Album of George Antheil

Regular readers probably know by now that the British Chandos label has released three volumes in a project by Andrew Davis and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra to record the orchestral works of Charles Ives. They may also know (not from this site, however) that a project to record the orchestral works of Aaron Copland with John Wilson conducting the BBC Philharmonic has thus far advanced to its second volume. It would appear that someone at Chandos has gotten hooked on twentieth-century music from the United States, perhaps with a preference for foot-stomping thigh-slapping Americanisms.

Last Friday that preference was reinforced with the launch of yet another series, once again involving the BBC Philharmonic. This time the conductor is John Storgårds; and the music is that of our country’s most notorious “bad boy” (by his own choice of epithet), George Antheil:

courtesy of Naxos of America

That reputation was earned in 1935 with the performance of his “Ballet Mécanique” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Antheil wrote this piece as accompaniment for a silent film of the same name created by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy, who worked with Man Ray as their cinematographer. The film was basically a Dadaist abstract study of mechanisms in motion, and Léger and Murphy may well have assumed the viewers would easily supply sounds of their own in their heads. Anyone who had done this would not, in any way, have been prepared for what Antheil came up with; and it takes only reviewing his instrumentation requirements to see why: sixteen synchronized player pianos, two grand pianos, electronically controlled bells, xylophones, bass drums, a siren, and three airplane propellers!

Antheil also has a significant non-musical reputation. During the Second World War he developed a technique known as frequency hopping that would prevent enemy “wiretapping” of radio signals being transmitted to guide torpedoes. The coding of those signals involved the use of punched paper tape, so the idea probably was the result of that interest in player pianos. Particularly interesting, however, is that Antheil had a partner in developing this invention and filing the patent for it, Hollywood film star Hedy Lamarr.

There is nothing particularly “bad boy” about the music included on the first Chandos release. Basically, all three of the selections on the album are joyously raucous, even more extroverted than anything by Copland and entirely lacking in any of the metaphysical brooding that permeates Ives’ New England transcendental rhetoric. Indeed, the title for Antheil’s fifth symphony, the third selection on the album, is “Joyous;” and since it was begun in 1947, the joy probably has to do with the end of the Second World War and the defeat of Adolf Hitler. This is music that makes Copland sound positively stodgy, and its energy level seems to have mined the same sources that both Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich had tapped when the War ended.

The other symphony on this album is the fifth symphony’s predecessor. The fourth was composed in 1942, meaning that the ideas probably began to emerge after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The music has very much a call-to-arms rhetoric; and some of Antheil’s contemporaries were quick to point out  the “family resemblance” with Shostakovich’s Opus 60 (“Leningrad”) symphony in C major, which was premiered in North America on July 19, 1942. In this case, however, Antheil pushed back, asserting that his primary source for this symphony was an opera he had composed in 1930.

The album begins with the premiere recording of “Over the Plains,” which can probably be described as a concert overture. It certainly takes the cake when it comes to revving up the audience for whatever may follow on a concert program. The primary theme sounds like a mash-up of “Red River Valley” and “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.” Given how little attention Ives had received by 1945, the year in which “Over the Plains” was composed, it is entirely possible that Antheil was unfamiliar with the trappings of “Ives country.” More likely, Antheil may have been wondering if he could use his friendship with Lamarr to get known by John Ford, the uncrowned king of the Western movie genre, so taken with the wide open spaces of Monument Valley that he had a house built there.

My guess is that there will be many quick to dismiss all three of these selections as pure corn. To them I would say, “Give it a rest, and let yourself have some fun for a change.” This music may not be profound, but it eschews both the rhetorical darkness of composers like Prokofiev and Shostakovich and the tub-thumping patriotic fervor of Copland. The best way to enjoy Antheil is to lower your guard and let his music get to you on its own terms.

Håkan Hardenberger will return to SFP as a Virtuosi Series Soloist

[added 4/5, 5:40 p.m.: CANCELLATION NOTICE

Due to family reasons, Håkan Hardenberger is unable to travel abroad. Sadly, that means that he has had to cancel his engagement with San Francisco Performances (SFP). Ticket holders have the options of exchanging for other tickets, receiving a refund, or making a donation to SFP. This can be arranged by calling SFP at 415-398-6449 or by sending electronic mail to tickets@sfperformances.org.]

April is the month in which three of the four concerts in the Virtuosi Series of the San Francisco Performances 2016–2017 season will take place. As was observed this past Thursday, the duo of violinist Alina Ibragimova and pianist Cédric Tiberghien will lead off the month with their second SFP visit as a duo. They will be followed a little over a week later by virtuoso trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger, who will be making his third SFP appearance. He made his SFP debut in 2005 with pianist Aleksander Madzar and returned in 2007 to give a duo recital with percussionist Colin Currie. Next month Hardenberger will be accompanied by pianist Roland Pöntinen, who made his SFP debut in 2007 accompanying clarinetist Martin Fröst.

The major work on the program will be Staffan Storm’s “Three Autumns,” which was commissioned by Musik i Syd for the 2016 Malmö Chamber Music Festival, at which Hardenberger and Pöntinen gave the world premiere performance. The work is a single-movement thirty-minute composition that imposes major technical challenges for both performers. The title refers not to the structure of the work but to its inspiration, the title of a poem by Anna Akhmatova. The poem examines three different senses of autumn; and, while the score mirrors those different senses, those impressions are seamlessly integrated into one uninterrupted movement. This recent composition will be preceded by an earlier work that is still known for its modernism, George Antheil’s four-movement sonata for trumpet, which was first performed in 1954 at Columbia University by pioneering American trumpeter Edna White Chandler.

The second half of the program will feature Pöntinen as both composer and arranger. However, the most familiar selection will be his solo performance of George Gershwin’s three solo piano preludes. His own composition is entitled “L’éléphant rose,” explicitly referring to the “pink elephants on parade” in Walt Disney’s Dumbo. In writing a trumpet part for Hardenberger, Pöntinen drew upon his interest in jazz and his appreciation of the styles of both Miles Davis and Lester Bowie, the latter having become involved in the mid-Sixties with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in Chicago and then became one of the cofounders of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. The two arrangements on the program are both based in narrative. The first of these draws upon Thomas Newman’s score for the HBO miniseries Angels in America, while the second comes from incidental music for a production of Anton Chekhov’s play The Seagull written by Swedish jazz pianist Jan Lundgren.

The remainder of the second half will feature two Swedish composers and one American. Sweden will be represented by Wilhelm Stenhammar from the nineteenth century and Nils Björkander from the twentieth. The Stenhammar selection is another solo piano composition, the first (in B minor) of the three fantasies he published as his Opus 11 in 1895. Björkander’s “Idyll” is also a piano solo, one of the four short pieces in a collection entitled Skärgårdsskisser (archipelago sketches) composed in 1924. The program will conclude with a concert waltz for trumpet and piano by the American composer Virgil Thomson entitled “At the Beach,” which nostalgically recalls an earlier era of “public music.”

This recital will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 11. It will take place in Herbst Theatre, located on the ground floor of the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. Tickets are being sold for $40 in the balcony, $55 for most of the Dress Circle, and $65 for premium seating. They may be purchased in advance through a City Box Office event page, which shows the Herbst floor plan and which prices apply to which sections. Tickets can also be purchased by calling 415-392-2545, as well as at the Herbst Box Office on the evening of the performance.

A Dynamic Duo of Inventors

As a result of Hedy’s Folly:  The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, Lamarr’s patent for torpedo guidance based on frequency-hopping (a technology now fundamental to cellular communications) is receiving revived (and probably overdue) attention.  However, for those of us more interested in music than movies, the story has an added twist.  The patent application actually had two authors.  The other author was the composer George Antheil, and one of his contributions was to control the frequency variations with a form of punched tape, an idea Antheil probably got from his work with player pianos.  This may be the ultimate “power couple” in this history of innovation!