The Antheil centenary boom goes on with further convincing advocacy from Hugh Wolff and his Frankfurt team. (For Symphonies Nos 1 and 6, see 11/00.) No 4, written in the worst years of the war, gets an ebullient performance which, for me, has the edge over the Ukranians since the recorded sound is richer. The music employs juxtapositions, exactly like cinematic cuts, that have little to do with symphonic development and are less dominated by Stravinsky than some of Antheil’s earlier works. The tunes are memorable.
The novelty here is Decatur at Algiers, called a nocturne although it’s based on Stephen Decatur conquering the Barbary pirates in the early 1800s. There’s an attractive Arabic flavour about the spooky principal theme on the oboe. This release also brings the Fifth Symphony – first recorded by the Vienna Philharmonia under Herbert Haefner in 1952 – back into the catalogue. This is a war symphony too. Antheil lost his brother in the conflict and dedicated the symphony to ‘the young dead of all countries who sacrificed everything’.
The first movement is continuously bustling in an idiom which crosses Stravinsky with jazz: it works. The Adagio molto is an elegiac siciliano, and the finale is a pot-pourri which raises constant echoes – that’s how musical kleptomania operates. Almost at the start Antheil recalls the opening of Shostakovich’s Fifth in homage to America’s wartime ally. These are all fine performances, well recorded too – another impressive case for later Antheil on his own terms