George Antheil's determined efforts to outrage the musical world of the mid-1920s (in which of course he was backed by all the pseuds and trendies of the time) and his preening posturing as ''the bad boy of music'' have earned him mention in most books about early twentieth-century art; but nowadays he is remembered, if at all, only for the mindless din of his notorious Ballet mecanique and for the fact that, together with the film actress Hedy Lamarr, he invented a torpedo. (I kid you not!) He himself said that he wanted his one-movement First Quartet to ''represent the kind of drunken energy of mediocrity'' (a curious ambition, only too successfully achieved): any shock value it had has long since evaporated, and now it seems only an overlong and unconvincing work of feebly repetitive ideas. Following Stravinsky, the idol of his Paris cronies, Antheil then turned to neo-classicism: his Second Quartet, he proclaimed, ''comes of a deep love and study of the late Beethoven quartets, but it is my own idiom''. It at least supplants the empty homophonic motor energy of the First Quartet with more cohesive melodic material and some counterpoint: Beethoven would have blenched at the atonal fugato in the second movement, might have smiled frostily at moments in the scherzo, while deploring its general disjointedness, but would probably have applauded the presto final cadenza (and certainly the Mondriaan Quartet's vivacity, buoyancy and precision).
After a politicized period, Antheil finally espoused a ''fundamentally American'' style, heavily influenced by folk music. The Third Quartet, employing traditional four-movement form for the first time and now reconciled to (fairly freely employed) tonality, is simply not recognizable as by the same composer as of the two previous quartets. I hope not to be branded as a reactionary if I say that, despite some folky naiveties, this is a far more accessible and enjoyable work, with a romantic Largo that in places touches poetry, and a finale with occasional Bartokian overtones. Perhaps Copland was more perceptive than he knew when, in the 1920s, he somewhat ambiguously declared that Antheil possessed ''the greatest gift of any young American now writing''. This is a revelatory disc, distinguished by excellent playing and recording.'