CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW: Brilliant Upstart By Jules Langert (Del Sol String Quartet, George Antheil, Charlton Lee, Kate Stenberg, Monica Scott, Rick Shinozaki, May 22, 2004)

CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW

Brilliant Upstart

May 22, 2004

George Antheil

By Jules Langert

The members of San Francisco's Del Sol String Quartet have discovered the music of American maverick George Antheil, the self-described “bad boy of music,” and they are enthusiastic about it. On Saturday in Berkeley they played all of his music for strings, comprising three full-sized quartets and two shorter works, most of them composed before he reached the age of thirty.

Antheil (1900-1959) was apparently a wunderkind who wrote some brilliantly effective music while still in his early twenties, like his Jazz Symphony, the second violin sonata, and the celebrated Ballet mécanique for multiple player pianos and percussion (including sirens and airplane propellers), a work performed a few years ago by the San Francisco Symphony. He was also a pianist of considerable ability and flair, who, living in Paris at that time, was known and applauded by Stravinsky, Picasso, Fernand Leger, Yeats, Hemingway, and his own personal champion, Ezra Pound.

Later, Antheil returned to the U.S., eventually settling in Los Angeles, where he began composing film music for a living, with John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart among his clients. At some ongoing point in his life he was a war correspondent, and at another time was writing a lonely-hearts column. In addition, he collaborated on the design of a radio-controlled torpedo with then-movie star Hedy Lamarr. They both share a patent for it. Quite an eventful career!

Del Sol Quartet
Charlton Lee, Kate Stenberg
Monica Scott, Rick Shinozaki

Del Sol's program arranged his music chronologically and the first piece was Lithuanian Nights, composed in 1919. Amazingly enough, this early piece in two brief, contrasting movements shows an instinctive, idiomatic understanding of string quartet texture along with the compositional skill to make it work. The lyrical first movement has an East-European flavor, slightly reminiscent of Bartók's much later Romanian Dances. The second movement is a dynamic Presto, with driving ostinatos and fragmented patterns whirling along at breakneck speed.

Antheil's next piece, the String Quartet #1 (1924), owes a stylistic debt to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring in its brief, interrupted sectional blocs and strong, repetitive rhythms. A vein of gypsy-like meditative lyricism is also present in the mix. His Quartet #2 (1927) is full of neo-classical parody, more bizarre and comical than anything by Stravinsky, with some very effective string writing in its jokey unpredictability.

The final work on the concert was Antheil's Quartet #3, composed in 1948 during his Hollywood (and post-Hedy Lamarr?) phase. Much of it sounds like music for a Hollywood Western, with long modal melodies galloping to the accompaniment of undulating arpeggios and triadic harmonies. Toward the end, a Shostakovich-like skitteriness adds a bit of hysteria to the overall effect, suggesting where Antheil might have been heading next.

Del Sol's performances were taut and propulsive, brooding and bizarre in all the right places. First violinist Kate Stenberg's throaty lyricism was sensuous and affecting in the first of the Lithuanian Nights, though there seemed to be a few intonational slips later in the program. Cellist Monica Scott made the most of Antheil's melodic writing while offering firm, lithe rhythmic support elsewhere. Violinist Rick Shinozaki and violist Charlton Lee added their own strong , persuasive contributions to this unusual program of works by a gifted, though much neglected, composer. The group hopes to record this repertoire on an upcoming CD, perhaps as part of a series devoted to Antheil's music.