Antheil - Symphonies Nos 4 and 5

The Guardian 80

BBC Philharmonic/Storgårds
(Chandos)

George Antheil may have styled himself the “bad boy of music” – the title of his autobiography – but he’s mostly remembered for a single work from his time in Paris in the 1920s, the Ballet Mécanique, which was intended to accompany a film by the artist Fernand Léger. In those days, Antheil had tagged along with the surrealists and futurists, but bad boys become less interesting as they grow up, and when he returned to the US and began producing scores for Hollywood, Antheil seems to have become an astonishingly lightweight composer. John Storgårds’ begins his new Antheil series for Chandos with three concert works from the 1940s. There’s the cutesy overture Over the Plains, recorded for the first time, and two of the symphonies, the Fourth, subtitled 1942, and the Fifth, Joyous, completed in 1948. Both are noisy, vacuous and trite, in a style that leans far too heavily on Shostakovich (the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies) and the Prokofiev of the Soviet ballets. Storgårds and the BBC Philharmonic give them their best shot, but with little reward.