Quartet No. 1 for Strings

If you’re still smarting from the judgments of some critic who did you a bad turn, here’s a quote of ironic inspiration. The U.S. music critics lobbed this one at Antheil early in his career: “It would be difficult to imagine music staler and more stupid.” Listening to Quartet No. 1 for Strings in one movement (1925) on this disc of works for string quartet, passionately performed by the Del Sol String Quartet, it’s clear the composer had an ear cocked towards his contemporaries, but his work has an emotional rigor that reaches out to grab the listener even all these years later. And perhaps that’s the very thing the critics of the day found to be so disconcerting.

—MS