‘The Lost Sonatas’ makes a good billing for this release but it’s only the very short Woman Sonata which New Grove designates as lost, although they are all unpublished. So this is its first recording and also that of the much later Third and Fifth Sonatas. Guy Livingston makes an excellent impression immediately and his fine Fazioli is cleanly recorded, giving real bite to his idiomatic use of staccato in a rhythmic context.

Both the Sonate sauvage and the Woman Sonata come from 1923, the year when Antheil scandalised artistic Paris with his début piano recital in the Champs-Elysées Theatre. Pound, Leger and Milhaud were in one of the boxes with Satie, who persisted in clapping even though Milhaud tried to restrain him. There’s nothing frightening now in these concentrated studies in the new techniques of note-clusters and glissandi attractively suffused with jazzy rhythms, which Antheil specifies to be played ‘mechanically’.

The first movement of the Third Sonata is close to a take-off of the opening theme of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier; the succeeding adagio is coolly melodic; and the finale, called ‘Diabolic Cartoon’, is a kind of mad tarantella. According to Livingston, a Prokofiev theme is the basis of the slow movements of both Nos 4 and 5. In the fourth Antheil said he wanted the andante to have ‘a sense of personal tragedy’ but also a ‘new sort of lyricism…even tenderness’. The resultant neo-classical idiom is closer to Prokofiev than Stravinsky. Nothing is exaggerated, nothing goes on too long and the unexpected twists help to define the personality of late Antheil – far away from the Bad-Boy-of-Music image, which was good for publicity until it boomeranged.

Livingston overlaps with Marthanne Verbit in her all-Antheil release (Albany, 11/95) with the Sauvage and Fourth Sonatas – he is drier and more rhythmic – but otherwise the two are complementary. He has spent some years preparing and presenting these little-known works and it shows: his interpretations, like his pianism, deserve the highest praise.