Piano Concerto No. 2

Piano Concerto No. 2

Philadelphia Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra conducted by Daniel Spalding George Antheil earned the moniker “bad boy of music” from both the title of his hyperbolic autobiography and from his early exploits as a composer, which included shocking audiences with tone clusters, airplane propellers, etc. Four generations later, most of the shock value has waned—is anything shocking… Read more »

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NewMusicBox Staff

Philadelphia Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra conducted by Daniel Spalding

George Antheil earned the moniker “bad boy of music” from both the title of his hyperbolic autobiography and from his early exploits as a composer, which included shocking audiences with tone clusters, airplane propellers, etc. Four generations later, most of the shock value has waned—is anything shocking now, anyway?—and we are just left with the music which contains many treasures beneath the surface. Pianist Guy Livingston has been Antheil’s most ardent champion in recent years, both through his dynamic performances and erudite scholarship. This new disc on New World gives us a bit of both sides of Livingston: a fascinating set of program notes on three little-known Antheil works and a rousing performance of one of them, the Piano Concerto No. 2 completed in 1927. This is not to say that the other works on the disc are any less worthy, but the performance of this concerto—which sounds like El Salon Mexico filtered through Charles Ives’s Second Orchestral Set—might have even made a convert out of Virgil Thomson, who dismissed the work at its premiere.

—FJO