George Antheil, Tianwa Yang, Nicholas Rimmer

This disc gathers the four violin sonatas of George Antheil. The New Jersey-born composer went to Europe in 1922 determined to become "noted and notorious" as a pianist-composer, and soon had a reputation as the bad boy of music. Three of the sonatas date from those years, 1923 and 1924, when he was also working on the Ballet mécanique. The fourth, of 1947-48, comes from a quarter of a century later and turns to Classical and Baroque models. They are played by the violinist Tianwa Yang and her long-standing partner, the pianist Nicholas Rimmer, who also plays drums in the second sonata. The disc places the early provocations next to the more traditional late work, which shows how far Antheil's language changed between the Paris years and the late 1940s.

Yang and Rimmer recorded the sonatas from 14 to 17 October 2021 in Saal 3 of the Haus des Rundfunks in Berlin, in a co-production with Deutschlandfunk Kultur. Wolfram Nehls produced, Julius Middendorff engineered and Frank K. DeWald wrote the notes. The four-movement Sonata No. 1, at 24 minutes the longest, shows the stamp of Stravinsky, with dry staccatos, playing behind the bridge and bow pressure that makes the tone break. The single-movement Sonata No. 2 is an experiment in what Antheil called musical cubism, a collage of tune fragments, folk music and ragtime that ends with Rimmer leaving the piano for a pair of drums. The Sonata No. 3 brings Stravinskian rhythm closer to song, with motoric piano patterns under a sad, pensive violin line and abrupt changes of character, and the Sonata No. 4 is in three movements, a Scherzo, Passacaglia Variations and a Toccata-Rondo. Stan Szpakowicz in MusicWeb International (2023) wrote that "Yang's attack is fearless and laser accurate", and The Strad found the fourth sonata "an attractive, virtuosic showpiece that Yang dispatches with aplomb".

Naxos CD 8.559937 in the American Classics series, released in 2023.