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.