Le Monde Selon George Antheil

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 education 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 Sonate Sauvage and the Jazz Sonate, which were not the only pieces of his that caused scandals. He also enjoyed cultivating the image of the "Bad Boy of Music" in other ways - this is incidentally 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 peace in the hall ..... But he wasn't all that bad: for example, he was devoted to Ludwig van Beethoven, whose works he always played in the first part of his concerts before he performed his own music. In 1933 he returned to the United States, where he met future icons of the American avant-garde, John Cage and Morton Feldman. However, this did not prevent him from considerably toning down his musical language and turning his attention to very different things. He wrote a crime novel and developed together with Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr an innovative radio remote control for torpedoes, the principle of which is still used today in Bluetooth. Patricia Kopatchinskaja and the young Finnish pianist Joonas Ahonen - who was presented by the London Times after a concert (for the reviewer "one of those concerts you remember forever") as the "doppelgänger" of the violinist! - pay tribute here to the equally famous and notorious "Bad Boy of Music".