George Antheil started his career writing wild and crazy works that went all over the place, and often presaged modernists who came after him, as his three violin sonatas from 1923 and 1924 bear out. By the time he composed his 1947/48 Fourth violin sonata, however, Antheil had considerably toned down his erstwhile “bad boy of music” image to become a distinctive mainstream modernist.
Sonata No. 1’s first movement is pure Stravinsky savagery, starting with L’Histoire du Soldat and settling into The Rite of Spring’s chugging rhythms piling up on top of one another. By contrast, the second movement’s delicate piano patterns are offset by the violin’s rapid glissando outbursts. The short and compact single-movement Sonata No. 2 evokes images of Max Fleisher cartoons gone haywire, with hints of vaudeville tunes and unpredictable mood shifts, not to mention added drums at the end. Sonata No. 3 similarly transpires in a single uninterrupted movement, offering a gentler, more songful take on Stravinsky’s rhythmic asymmetry.
Imagine Ives in a patriotic mood welded on to Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf on steroids, and you’ll get an idea of Sonata No. 4’s opening Scherzo. The second-movement variations are based on a six-bar passacaglia theme stated at the outset by the piano. Here the music’s easy flow and seeming spontaneity actually results from rigor and control, notably in the seventh variation, which is an elaborate canon. The Toccata finale evokes the unbridled energy of Antheil’s youth, yet with a richer harmonic palette and steadier momentum.
It is obvious that violinist Tianwa Yang and pianist Nicholas Rimmer have prepared these unwieldy scores with the utmost care and attention to detail, not to mention their effortless instrumental mastery. If I wanted to be picky, I’d lean toward the terser, harder-edged fast movements in an earlier Antheil sonata cycle on the Azica label featuring violinist Mark Fewer and composer/pianist John Novacek. In any event, Naxos’ superior engineering and superb annotations enhance my recommendation of a disc that truly contributes to the catalog.
