After his avant-garde period, Antheil moved to Hollywood, where he composed over a dozen film scores and also studied classical masters, leading to more traditional piano sonatas, string quartets, and symphonies.
Composition History
Antheil's most famous work, Ballet mécanique, premiered in 1926 and was originally conceived as a film score, featuring an unusual instrumentation including player pianos, grand pianos, xylophones, electric bells, aircraft engines, and sirens.
Composer Biography
Beyond music, Antheil was a versatile artist who published columns, wrote books, worked as a radio commentator, and even co-invented a torpedo for the US Army with actress Hedy Lamarr.
Performer Biography
Gottlieb Wallisch, the pianist on this album, won first prize in The Stravinsky Awards in America at age sixteen and was appointed professor for piano at the Geneva University of Music in 2010.
Composer Biography
Antheil spent most of the 1920s in Paris, where he became a sensational member of the artists' community, connecting with figures like Picasso, Joyce, Man Ray, Satie, Cocteau, Dalí, and Hemingway.
Composer's Artistic Vision
Antheil's early compositions, which he aimed to make "hard as stone," are described as collages with intentional inconsistencies and fragmented motifs, reflecting the industrial machine age of the 1920s.
Composer Biography
George Antheil, an American pianist and composer, was so obsessed with music that he played the piano up to 16 hours a day, curing his swollen fingers in an ice bucket.
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