George Antheil -Ballet Mechanique (EMF Media)

While the infamous “Bad Boy”’s romp through industrojazz is this fascinating disc’s centerpiece, it is certainly not the only point of interest. Among the miniatures on offer, John Cage and Lou Harrison’s “Double Music” from 1941 stands out, is this hypnotic collaborative gem for various tuned and untuned percussion with which I was unfamiliar. There is also a rather astonishing rendering of the Salterello-Presto movement from Felix Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony, arranged by Paul Lehrman for sixteen player pianos, a wild expansion of the four-hand piano trope.

Then, there’s the ballet. For the uninitiated, it’s loud, a relentless half hour of rhythmic bang as a problematic child of the equally infamous Rite is born. While there have been several recordings of the piece, this is the first for the 1924 version, not quite the original version but very close. All but impossible at the time of composition, the present revision, for xylophones, tamtams, siren, airplane propellers, bass drums and sixteen synchronized player pianos, was not premiered until 1999. Jeffrey Fischer conducts the University of Massachusetts Lowell Percussion Ensemble in an engaging performance where volume never supersedes clarity. The rhythms are strong, the stratified layers well defined, and each instrument is beautifully recorded in a resonant space.

I played this performance last Sunday morning on a friend’s radio show. We programmed it to follow one of the Lassus Penitential Psalms, and I couldn’t help feeling just a bit of that bad boy glee.

~ Marc Medwin