Like the majority of articles on these pages, you're likely not to have heard of the person I'm writing about and will have missed it all anyway. However, this time it's not your fault: you have an excuse! Owing to the cancellation of a concert last term, the latest Thursday lunchtime concert in the Music Department this week was only settled upon recently…and it was really rather good, actually.

The piano music of George Antheil whirrs, rustles, creaks and stamps. When young in the Paris of the 1920s, he was a gun-toting surrealist composer writing Vorticist piano works: Stravinskian, fragmentary, mechanistic and absurd piano sonatas lasting just over a minute. When he moved to Hollywood in the 1930s his polemical verve evaporated and gave way to sentimental stuff, ballets and symphonic scores imbued with the stamp of tradition.

Death of Machines (1922) is a piano sonata of four movements, lasting just over a minute and a half, and was the opening item in the concert. After this, Berceuse for Thomas Montgomery Newman (1955) and The Ben Hecht Valses (1943) followed apace - the contrast from helter-skelter mechanistic flurries to sentimental cinematic schmaltz couldn't have been starker, or perhaps more poignant. By way of rapprochement vis a vis these two extremes came Musical Portrait of a Friend (1946) which marked out the close of the first half of the concert.

The second half was devoted to La Femmme 100 Têtes (1933) - a very strange kettle of fish indeed. Based on a novel by Max Ernst and translated by him as The Hundred Headless Woman, the function of this piece is unclear: was it music to accompany a showing of the novel (built up entirely of engravings and not words), or just to reflect it? What is clear, though, is that it represents one of his most extended and varied pieces for piano comprising of forty-four separate movements and lasts about half an hour. If variable in content it does have moments of delightful mischief and reflective subtlety - it also heralds the close of Antheil's early Stravinskian modus operandi and gives us a cross-section of his technique.

Who was the pianist? Nicholas Hodges - who'd just hotfooted from the BBC's John Adams weekend in London. His dexterity refined encompassing of every detail of Antheil's mercurial polyrhythms and finger-breaking mischief - not to mention cogent and insightful commentary - was truly breath-taking. Thank god for cancellations…

Douglas Bertram