The common thread running through cubism, primitivism, dadaism, surrealism and all the other modernist ‘isms’ at the turn of the 20th century was the belief that ‘the tradition’ was stifling creativity, a view shared by several young, up-and-coming European classical composers. To them the exuberance of ragtime and the emergence of jazz was a breath of fresh air that brought something new to the European arts, a view shared by a circle of Parisian composers known as ‘Les Six’ – Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc and Germaine Tailleferre (plus their mischievous ‘grandfather’ Eric Satie). Each of them wrote pieces inspired (rather than influenced) by jazz as a means of broadening European classical expressionism. They were not alone, Stravinsky similarly came under jazz's spell – ‘Piano Rag Music’, ‘The Soldier's Tale’, ‘Three Pieces for Clarinet’, ‘Ragtime for Eleven Instruments’ and later in 1944, ‘Ebony Concerto’ for Woody Herman. Claude Debussy, Louis Gruenberg, Bohuslav Martinu, Erwin Schulhoff and Ravel were all similarly inspired by jazz and pieces they wrote at the time reflected this – not least Ravel's (who took jazz lessons from jazz trombonist Léo Vauchant) famous composition ‘Bolero’. That European composers had come under the spell of jazz came as a shock to the American classical establishment, who had roundly condemned jazz, and some became curious to see what jazz could offer. George Antheil – born in 1900 – was, by the age of 20, studying Stravinsky and the work of Les Six, and in 1922 moved to Berlin, where he met and received the encouragement of Stravinsky, before moving to Paris, then a centre of modernist musical and artistic innovation, where he debuted with a concert of his works that had Erik Satie and Darius Milhaud in the audience. Returning to America, Paul Whiteman commissioned his ‘Jazz Symphony’ in 1925 for his ‘Experiment in Modern Music’ concert series (seven concerts over a 14-year period to 25 December 1938), but it was deemed too radical. He premiered the composition himself together with his ‘Ballet Mécanique’ at Carnegie Hall on 10 April 1927, an event that had an element of high comedy when a wind machine jammed and had musicians desperately clinging to their sheet music and ladies in the audience similarly holding on to their hats. Nevertheless, it was praised by George Gershwin, whose debut of ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra at the Aeolian Hall on 12 February 1924 is now regarded as the defining moment of American modernism, along with Aaron Copeland. It is, like the work of Les Six, Stravinsky and others, Antheil's interpretation of jazz and was intended to shake up a tradition that they considered had ossified with the work of Schoenberg and serialists such as Alban Berg and Anton Webern who they considered had lost touch with audiences. Today, Antheil's ‘Jazz Symphony’ is regarded as among the first significant modernist works that responded to the vitality and energy of early jazz, along with Gershwin's ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ (1924) and Milhaud's ‘La Création du Monde’ (1923). Certainly, ‘Jazz Symphony’ includes reference to Stravinsky's ‘La Sacre du Printemps’ and ‘Petrushka’ (equally his ‘Piano Concerto No. 1’, also in this set, borrows from ‘Petrushka’ and ‘The Rite of Spring’) but then three years earlier he had, for a while, been taken under Stravinsky's wing in Berlin (where he wrote ‘Piano Concerto No. 1’). Even so, the realisation of ‘Jazz Symphony’ would not have been possible without taking the idiom seriously enough to be reinterpreted within a different realm of music, which is achieved with success and a certain riotous energy then associated with early jazz. This is a fine interpretation by Frank Dupree and the Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie presumably Antheil's 1955 re-orchestration, with less dissonance and avant-garde effect than the original, which as an older man he felt betrayed his youth. Also included in this set are ‘Capital of the World Suite’ and ‘Archipelago Rhumba’.