Thomas Beecham always
liked a saucy wit and he liked Virgil
Thomson. The feeling was mutual. Looking
at the cover photograph of Thomson,
resplendent in superbly cut pin-striped
and double breasted suit, standing by
a column, his glasses tightly clenched
in his right hand and left hand slipped
barrister-style into left pocket, I
thought he could even be modelling for
the conductor. How instructive then
to turn from the elegant Savile Row
cut of his cloth to his instrumental,
chamber and vocal music presented in
this disc. It’s a reissue and devotees
of the highways and byways of American
music may have caught up with it over
a decade ago on Musical Heritage Society.
Those yet to make the acquaintance of
Thomson in less opulent canvases than
his more popular orchestral, ballet
or operatic works will like to investigate.
The Synthetic Waltzes
date from 1925 and Thomson’s very early
thirties. They’re as naughty as La Pigalle
after dark – waltzes subject to rhythmic
and metrical displacements, though not
omitting to include a trademark glorious
tune. And yes, it really is glorious
and how typical of the dandy to sink
it in a jeu d’esprit such as
this. The Violin Sonata followed five
years later, still in Thomson’s Parisian
days, and is written in his personalised
brand of neo-classicism in four movements.
The slow movement sounds like slightly
displaced Handel, the Waltz (he was
fond of subverting them) is a bumptious
wrong note affair, whilst the finale
develops a ripplingly lyric dynamism.
The rest of the disc
is devoted to Thomson’s settings of
Campion, Marianne Moore and a sundry
collection called Praises and Prayers.
The four Campion settings are written
for mezzo, clarinet, viola and harp,
an intriguing ensemble perhaps rather
more associated with the salon but here
used to entirely different musical ends.
Short but not epigrammatic, Thomson
responds with great finesse to these
settings, a love of which poetry aligned
him once more with Beecham, who could
recite reams of the stuff. In 1963 he
set Two by Marianne Moore. Both
are short; the first is emphatic, the
second madcap – not surprisingly since
the poem is My Crow Pluto, an
example of Moore’s more esoteric sense
of humour.
Praises and Prayers
dates from the same year as the
Moore settings. Saint Francis of Assisi,
Richard Crashaw and jostle with Anonymous.
Thomson responds with simple piety to
the St Augustine, with powerful climax
in the Crashaw and with roundel joy
in the anonymous setting of Before
Sleeping.
The performances are
thoroughly committed and if not the
last word in finesse at least certainly
on the right side of engagement. Thomson’s
insouciance may sometimes be held against
him but at his finest in these works,
especially the vocal settings, he shows
the utmost clarity and beauty in his
response.
Jonathan Woolf
Continuum/Cheryl Seltzer and Joel Sachs (directors)
