Piano Concertos of the Twenties

On this CD:

1. Piano Concerto No. 1 (1922)
Composed by George Antheil
Performed by Bamberg Symphony Chorus with Michael Rische
Conducted by Christoph Poppen

2. Piano Concerto Andante sostenuto
Composed by Aaron Copland
Performed by Cologne WDR Sinfonie Orchester with Michael Rische
Conducted by Steven Sloane

3. Piano Concerto Molto moderato - Allegro assai
Composed by Aaron Copland
Performed by Cologne WDR Sinfonie Orchester with Michael Rische
Conducted by Steven Sloane

4. Concertino for piano & orchestra, H 55
Composed by Arthur Honegger
Performed by Cologne WDR Sinfonie Orchester with Michael Rische
Conducted by Steven Sloane

5. Piano Concerto in G major Allegramente
Composed by Maurice Ravel
Performed by Cologne WDR Sinfonie Orchester with Michael Rische
Conducted by Israel Yinon

6. Piano Concerto in G major Adagio assai
Composed by Maurice Ravel
Performed by Cologne WDR Sinfonie Orchester with Michael Rische
Conducted by Israel Yinon

7. Piano Concerto in G major Presto
Composed by Maurice Ravel
Performed by Cologne WDR Sinfonie Orchester with Michael Rische
Conducted by Israel Yinon

Customer Reviews:

An enjoyable collection, with Antheil's brilliant and colorful Concerto of 1922, forgotten and recently rediscovered.......2007-03-14

The career of George Antheil is a fascinating and depressing case of "What went wrong?" Here you have, in the 1920s, a brilliant young composer vying for world recognition and fame, and writing, to obtain them, music that is outlandishly provocative, but also strikingly imaginative, innovative - and fun. By 1923 he is the fad of Paris - and then it all starts to go awry. A catastrophic concert given in 1927 at Carnegie Hall, in which a poorly rehearsed and performed "Ballet Mécanique" is received as a Barnum-like piece of gimmickry, seems to be the point of tides turning. His reputation was durably harmed in the United States, while he soon fell from favor in France as well. He never recovered from that flop, despite the fugitive revival of interest he attracted when Stokowski premiered his 4th symphony in 1944 and when he published his famous autobiography "Bad Boy of Music". He died of a heart attack in 1959, embittered and incomprehensive.

Many explanations can be offered, and one is that Antheil's compositional outlook soon evolved, by way of a "French-Stravinskyan" neo-classicism towards a new concern for the big symphonic form. In the process, he himself scornfully rejected his early compositional style - in his biography he calls his 1923 two Violin and Piano Sonatas "Great Empty Chic", and the comment might apply to all his output of the period - to the point of not making many efforts to get his music published or performed. When the composer himself doesn't believe in his own music, what hope is there?

Another explanation is that, in many of these early compositions, Antheil cannot help but pay tribute to his much-worshiped compositional God, Stravinsky, by peppering them with quotes from Petrushka, Le Sacre, Les Noces, The Soldier's Tale..., to the point of making his music sound imitative and derivative, neglecting the fact that his formal processes of construction are much more extreme than Stravinsky's, that his quotation craze can be seen as a forerunner of post-modern Collage, and that his sheer joy at producing a racket goes one step beyond Stravinsky (much in the same way as Varèse's Amériques compared to "Le Sacre").

The 1st piano concerto is a good case in point.

In his autobiography Antheil makes only a cursory reference to it. In the summer of 1922, he inaugurated a concert tour of Germany by going to the first "International Festival of New Music" at Donaueschingen, with the hope of meeting conductors and showing them his symphony "and the new piano concerto". And this is it. Unlike the symphony the concerto wasn't performed. By 1945, Antheil wasn't interested anymore. The manuscript was unearthed in Antheil's papers in 1999. The concerto was given its first performance by this very pianist in March 2001 and the recording made in October.

It is a brilliant, brash and colorfully orchestrated work, using the construction processes so typical of Antheil in those years, with the juxtaposition and obsessive repetition of short passages with a strong rhythmic and melodic identity but very little thematic development. It also plunges the listener into a "trivia pursuit" game of trying to recognize the various influences and quotations. Some of Antheil's themes sound like a cliché of "Chinese music" as seen by Western composers then. Stravinsky's "Rossignol" often comes to mind (try 9:45 and 10:40), with some whiffs of Petrushka (3:30, again at 14:05 and 16:00, obviously two direct quotations). I also hear some Gershwin (try the passage starting at 3:45), Ravel (the arpeggios at 11:00 could be from the two piano version of "Ma Mère L'Oye" or from the Concerto in G - which by the way also has its "Chinese" moments), Bloch (the sinuous "Arabian Nights" melody played by the strings at 17:49), Ives (the cacophony at 15:50) and you even get some of Orff's Carmina Burana at 19:21, while the striking final chord reminds me of the same in Schoenberg's "Survivor from Warsaw". But wait! Many of these works were written later than 1922. What are we to make of it? Is this a case of Antheil being plundered by the others - not likely, if the concerto lay dormant in his papers. Or was Antheil an unjustly unrecognized precursor, rather than a follower (he talks of one of those in his bio, an Ernest Fanelli, whom supposedly Debussy, Ravel and Satie frequented and borrowed all their compositional techniques from - which apparently might be true, if some reviews of the Marco Polo release of Fanelli's works are to be believed). Or maybe I am just hearing things that are not in the music. Anyway, the Concerto is a brilliant, colorful, inventive and fun.

With the other compositions on the disc, it makes for a well-filled (70 minutes), intelligent and coherent, jazz-inspired program (to which the companion disc must be added, with more Antheil - his Jazz-Symphony -, Schulhoff and, appropriately, Gershwin: Piano Concertos of the 1920s). Two of the composers (Ravel and Honegger) are French and the two others are American with strong French ties (Copland studied with Nadia Boulanger). The works date from a same time-span, from 1922 (Antheil) to 1930 (Ravel). The Jazz inspiration is more in evidence in Copland (strongly) and Ravel (so deftly integrated as to sound Ravelian), Honegger's Concertino, rarely recorded, is a neo-classic piece whose first section could have been written by Stravinsky (another similarity with Antheil ), but whose 2nd and 3rd sections, with their snarling brass, marching rhythm and build-up of tension, sound very typical Honegger. I can't make an informed pronouncement on the quality of interpretation of the Copland, but the Ravel gets an excellent performance, very true to the French style established by Marguerite Long and followed by Jean Casadesus, Monique Haas, Nicole Henriot, Jean Doyen and Vlado Perlemuter, in its brilliance, dynamism and light-footedness, but also its relative dryness and refusal to "milk the cow" in the more lyrical and effusive passages. Rische gets truly outstanding support from the Köln Radio Orchestra and Israel Yinon.

An acceptable survey of 1920s concerti.......2004-01-13

A brief note before the review: at present this disc is available in two identical incarnations on amazon.com. Currently this incarnation costs $3.50 more, so you might wish to look at the other one before buying (its ASIN is B00005J46F).

This CD from the German Arte Nova label continues their interest in 20th century music, with it containing four 1920s piano concertos played by the German pianist and academic Michael Rische. Rische is probably more famous for being the man who discovered previously lost piano concertos by Antheil and Schulhoff than for his playing itself, but this disc gives him an opportunity to show his pianistic abilities in a program that includes the Antheil work he rediscovered.

Indeed, the disc opens with Antheil's work. Written in 1922, four years before the work usually described as the Antheil Piano Concerto, this is a single-movement work lasting 20 minutes, written in a primarily rhythmic style. Largely based on the constant reiteration of a theme derived from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, the concerto also makes detours towards boogie-woogie and to conventional virtuoso pianism. The orchestral part is unsophisticated and takes a largely subservient role to the rhythmic peregrinations of the piano. This isn't a major work, but Antheil fans will certainly want to hear it.

Rather stronger is Copland's two-movement piano concerto from 1926. The slow first movement counterpoints blues figurations against premonitions of the composer's later Americana style. It is succeded by a vigorously rhythmic finale distinctly related to the swing music of the era. Even though it is not a very subtle work, Copland's piano concerto is still a lot of fun.

Honegger's 1924 Concertino, lasting about ten minutes, is rather less jazz-inflected than the preceding works. It is in three movements that play without a break. A lively, neo-classical Allegro is followed by a lightly scored Larghetto, before the jazz influence reappears in the allegedly bluesy finale. If hardly the serious Honegger we know from the symphonies, this work still contains more than a few prefigurations of his mature style.

In contrast to its predecessors on the disc, Ravel's G major piano concerto is by now a bona fide classic. The first movement has a lyrical, jazz-inflected style and the finale is a brief presto, but the heart of the work is the weightless slow movement--one of Ravel's finest creations--where time almost seems to stand still.

This collection is worth considering, particularly at the price, but it's primarily valuable for Antheil fans as Rische's performances (particularly in the Ravel) are acceptable rather than inspired, and the orchestral contribution is mostly on a similar level.

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