They Sound Good to Me

I don't remember when I discovered Virgil's music. I recall a minor composer of the Viennese persuasion showing me, ca. 1944, one of the sonatas and guffawing immoderately. I should guess that the rev­elation came with Stoky's Victor recording of The Plough That Broke the Plains, whose concluding fugal tango still haunts me. (Remember, I was the country kid who thought for my first 14 years that music climaxed with Stephen Foster.)

Anyhow, what Virgil showed me was that diatonicism was not dead and that if you had imagination you could still make it produce wonderful music. (His child­hood experience was, after all, not that dif­ferent from mine.) Ever since, wherever the opportunity arose, I have collected Thomson records and over the years have acquired a pretty solid representation of his output, to which, for pleasure, I recur rather frequently. (Also, Thomson was one of the most acute and most readable of all music critics, and I hope he'll forgive me for saying that I suspect his writing had some effect on mine.)

Not that Thomson has had all that much attention from the record people. The vo­cal music, for example, has been largely ignored, and one (I anyhow) would love to know more of the incidental music, of which he produced a great deal for both stage and screen (Girardoux' Ondine, for example, and the Kim Stanley film The Goddess. Some of the latter (The Plough, The River, e.g.) has been, phonograph­ically speaking, the most durable Thom­son, but most of his larger works, if record­ed at all, get one recording and vanish from the catalog in a few years.

In form, if not in substance, the present record is something of an oddity, present­ing as it does solo piano versions of four stage-and-screen scores. Since transcrip­tions wring the withers of today's musical puritans, Thomson was asked to justify these. With his usual disarming common sense he did: they sound good and people seem to like them. Q.E.D.! They sound good to me and I like them.

Thomson's most famous film scores were written for documentaries. In the 1930s the New Deal hired Pare Lorentz, then known as a film critic, to lobby cin­ematographically for certain agrarian re­forms. His first film, The Plough That Broke the Plains, showed graphically how our usual blundering greed had turned some of the richest farmland in the world literally to dust. Thomson's score, four movements of which are heard here, is folk-based and compelling.

In 1948 he teamed up with the great Robert Flaherty on Louisiana Story (for Standard Oil), showing the (favorable) impact of the oil industry on the Bayou country. There are two orchestral suites from Thomson's score. This one is essen­tially the Acadian Songs and Dances, not, alas! recorded in its original form since Thomas Scherman did it over 30 years ago.

Filling Station is a tongue-in-cheek cops-and-robbers ballet for Lew Christen­sen and the Ballet Caravan, originally danced to a piano score. (Leon Barzin's re­cording of the orchestral version is long gone.) Finally, the so-called dances from Thomson's last opera Lord Byron (un­recorded) are something of a curiosity. Thomson intended to have his friend Sir Frederick Ashton choreograph a ballet, but the two never got together on it. At the last minute Thomson orchestrated his Second String Quartet, but didn't like the way it worked in the opera, took it out, and published it as Symphony No 3! Clear, vivid recording.