Join Chief Guest Conductor, John Storgårds, for a live 91ȱ Radio 3 broadcast featuring the self-styled “bad boy of music”, George Antheil. Antheil's 'mechanistic' works made him the rage of the 1920s Parisian artistic community and 'bad boy' of the music scene.
This afternoon we hear Antheil's First Symphony, “Zingaresca”, dating from his early twenties. In 1922 Antheil announced that jazz was “one of the greatest artistic landmarks of modern art” and this symphony is a prime example of the way in which he incorporated the sounds and styles of jazz into classical music.
Commissioned in 1952 to write music for a ballet based on a Hemingway short story, Antheil flavours his Capital of the World with American, Russian and Spanish influences.