George Antheil's Ballet mecanique (1925-6) has acquired a notoriety—through textbook reference rather than performance—out of all proportion to its musical merits. The best that can be said of it is that its 27 minutes are not unremittingly deafening, and Antheil's use of fragmentation and silence in the third part is a welcome concession to aesthetic conventions of balance and variety that the two earlier parts seem determined to bury for ever.
Ballet mecanique was Antheil's youthful response to the gloriously liberated atmosphere of Paris in the mid-1920s, when 'anything went', including compositions for pianola with multiple pianos, xylophones and percussion (hideously wailing sirens prominent). But it is the other, earlier works on the disc which reveal why Antheil's music is worth taking seriously. The First String Quartet may be inconsequential in form, but it has an appealing lyric quality, and its livelier episodes confirm that Antheil could digest, and not simply copy, the formidable influence of Stravinsky.
The Jazz Symphony and the Second Violin Sonata enjoy themselves with collages of quotations and allusions, and are far more genial in atmosphere than Ballet mecanique. The symphony has more to do with dance music than with jazz 'proper' (no wonder Gershwin was puzzled by it) and also has clear links with mainstream French music—Ibert, even Ravel. The sonata is less anxious to please, and comparisons with Ives are therefore more appropriate: the imaginative reticence of the ending is particularly attractive.
The enterprise embodied in this expertly performed disc stems from the re-creation, in 1989, of a scandalous Carnegie Hall concert of 1927. There seem to be fewer players credited for Ballet mecanique than appear in the booklet photograph, but even so the noise is phenomenal, and the engineers did well to contain it within ear-stretching rather than ear-bursting bounds.'