The Plow that Broke the Plains. The River
Post-Classical Ensemble / Angel Gil-Ordóñez,
Naxos American Classics 0 8 559291 (56' • DDD)

America's inter-war disasters drew this stunning music from Thomson USW, ( UMW S OM Virgil Thomson is remembered more as an urbane Francophile, a sophisticated composer and a man of letters working as a critic in New York City. But his diversity as a composer helped him capture rural America in a pair of documentary film scores from the 1930s. Heard here for the first time in complete form since serving as soundtracks to The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1939), this music told tales of woe that struck middle America in and around the Depression: the Dust Bowl and flooding.

A product of Roosevelt's New Deal, the films were designed not just to document but to educate the public on some of the reasoning behind the ecological disasters. If the scope was immense for film-maker Pare Lorentz, Thomson matched it. And if some of the soundtrack sounds Coplandesque or even cliched Americana, it's simply because others, including Copland, imitated Thomson's approach. Using relatively simple material and often stark and open orchestration, turning to the popular instruments such as banjo, saxophone, guitar and harmonium, and incorporating quotes of hymns and popular music, Thomson profiled the time and place with stunning insight.

That the scores have drama of their own is certainly in part due to the committed performance from Angel Gil-Ordóñez's Post-Classical Ensemble. This music may still be best heard when viewing the documentaries — Naxos also has released The Plaza and The River on DVD with these recordings replacing the original soundtracks — but the influential nature of these scores and their own intrinsic value make a good case for concert fare, too.

- Andrew Druckenbrod, Gramophone March 2008, pg. 42