Although these recordings were made well before Virgil Thomson's death in September 1989 in his 93rd year, the effect is of an In Memoriam. A Solemn Music, the richly orchestrated passacaglia with which he commemorated two of his Parisian friends, including the most important, the writer Gertrude Stein, is more than enough to correct glib assumptions that Thomson was capable only of light, jokey music. Even the short Joyful Fugue which Thomson attached to A Solemn Music in the interests of bracing contrast is not unambivalently exuberant. There is more than a touch of minor-key strenuousness to its busy counterpoint, though this effect may be due in part to performances which are sometimes rather stodgy, and a sound lacking the fullness and bloom that would reveal Thomson's skilful orchestration in all its subtlety.
'Bracing contrast' is what the record as a whole provides, with compound interest. Thomson at his most Puckish can be heard in the two symphonies, both relatively early pieces and not without moments of desultory under-composition, though there are strong compensations, not so much in the simple ideas as in the unexpected flights of fancy, like the ''suggestion of a distant railway train'' at the end of the second movement of the Symphony on a Hymn Tune.
Well nigh 40 years later Thomson composed his third and last opera, Lord Byron, and anyone familiar with Four Saints in Three Acts, his first work for the stage, may initially be disconcerted at the post-impressionist or neo-romantic style of Byron. But the brief settings of Byron's own poetry included here have shapely vocal lines and evocative instrumental support. Only in the fourth does Thomson's lifelong dislike of emotional overemphasis produce a rather bland setting of lines that cry out for something more passionate: ''I'd sooner burn in hell till the whole of me's charred/As small and black as your self-satisfied heart''. The Love Scene from Byron's Don Juan (for which maddeningly, Albany have failed to provide the text) is also rather too reserved in tone and temperament, though the orchestral Shipwreck preceding it plays pictorialism for all its considerable worth.'