Search - Virgil Thomson, Charles Fussell, Nashville Chamber Orchestra :: Rider on the Plains [Hybrid SACD]

An Important American Cello Concerto, and More

J Scott Morrison | Middlebury VT, USA | 12/04/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I remember very well a recording of Virgil Thomson's cello concerto made some time in the 1950s by its dedicatee, Luigi Silva, and fell in love with it. It was one of my earliest encounters with the music of Thomson. As it turns out, it is not entirely typical of his oeuvre because it is, unlike so much of his music, virtuosic in the extreme. Thomson was known for his simple-sounding music. And indeed there is much in the cello concerto that initially sounds simple, largely because of his use of seemingly unsophisticated middle-American folk- and hymn-tunes. ('Yes, Jesus Loves Me' figures prominently in the finale which is subtitled 'Children's Games'. This CD is called 'Rider on the Plains' from the subtitle for the concerto's first movement which evokes the wide-open spaces of the plains states.) But the technical demands on the soloist are uncharacteristically extreme. The cellist spends much of his time in the upper reaches of the instrument's range, and there are some gangbusters arpeggios that call for absolutely secure technique. All of this is in the service of completely tonal -- one might even say 'triadic' -- music that is immediately assimilable by any listener capable of responding to, say, the music of Copland or Bernstein. Cellist Emmanuel Feldman does an exemplary job of negotiating the work's terrors, and he makes real music out of it, as does the Nashville Chamber Orchestra under Paul Gambill.



There is more Thomson cello music included here, namely 'Four Portraits for Cello and Piano' (originally written for piano solo but transcribed for cello and piano by the aforementioned Luigi Silva). And then there is Thomson's 'Portrait of Frederic James' which was written for cello and piano. (As a former Kansas Citian, I was tickled to hear this piece as the painter, Frederic James, like Thomson, was a Kansas City native.)



The CD is rounded out by two works by a former student of Virgil Thomson's, Charles Fussell (b. 1938), at one time on the faculties of, among others, Smith College, UMass and Boston University; he is currently at Rutgers. 'Right River', a cello concerto in all but name, is a set of variations on an original theme for cello and strings (here supplied by the New England String Ensemble conductor Susan Davenny Wyner) written in a somewhat gnarlier style than Thomson's but accessible for all that. It depicts, among other things, a contemplative canoe ride. Then there are 'Two Ballades for Cello and Piano' written for Joel Krosnick in 1968; they are coloristic -- the piano part sometimes sounds like something by Toru Takemitsu -- and rhapsodic. The collaborating pianist in these and the Thomson portraits is the fine Joy Cline Phinney.



I had not known of Emmanuel Feldman before I got this CD, but he is an accomplished artist. (Is he related to composer Morton Feldman, I wonder?) For the performance of the Thomson concerto alone this CD is worth every penny.



Scott Morrison"