Complete Violin Music 1

George Antheil (1900-1959) had a double life. In the twenties, Antheil was trying to establish his reputation as the torchbearer of the avant-garde: he lived mostly in Europe, scandalizing the public with his iconoclastic music and furiously percussive piano playing. However, in a dramatic turn following a profound personal and artistic crisis, Antheil re-emerged, now in his early forties, as a neo-romantic, fully-integrated American composer, even, to some extent, a conservative. The four sonatas in this first volume of his violin music exemplify the two periods of his creativity. They document Antheil's musical evolution from the percussive First, to the Dadaist-cubist Second and the more neoclassical Third. A hiatus of 25 years separate these early scores from the so-called Second Violin Sonata (i.e. his Fourth Sonata), composed in 1947-48, which is clearly a more classically structured composition.