The American composer and pianist George Antheil (1900-1959) described himself as a "pianist-futurist". As a child of the 20th century, he loved speed, cars and airplanes. To continue his studies and sponsored by a wealthy American woman, he settled in Paris during the Années Folles, where he met Pablo Picasso and Igor Stravinsky and composed works such as the Sonata Sauvage and the Jazz Sonata, which were not the only pieces of his that caused tangible or rather physical scandals.
In other ways too, he cultivated the image of the "bad boy of music" - which is also the title of his extremely entertaining autobiography! During a concert in Budapest, he even waved a pistol in the style of a Chicago gangster to keep the audience quiet.... But he wasn't all bad: for example, he adored Ludwig van Beethoven, whose works he used to play in the first part of his concerts before performing his own music.
In 1933 he returned to the United States, where he met the future icons of the American avant-garde, John Cage and Morton Feldman. This certainly didn't prevent him from considerably weakening his musical language and turning to entirely different things. He wrote a crime novel and developed an innovative radio control system for torpedoes together with Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr, the principle of which is still used today in Bluetooth.
Patricia Kopatchinskaja and the young Finnish pianist Joonas Ahonen - who was introduced by the London Times after a concert as the "doppelgänger" of the violinist (for the reviewer "one of those concerts you remember forever")! - pay tribute here to the equally famous and notorious "Bad Boy of Music".
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