The claims of Virgil Thomson are being urged with many recordings since his death three years ago at 92, and now we are reminded that Randall Thompson (1899-1984) was not just a composer of occasional music for choirs. Randall Thompson was also a good Harvard man, who trained there before spending three years in Italy, and returned to become a distinguished teacher, ending his career back at his alma mater. Thompson's more extended choral works, such as The Peaceable Kingdom, have seemed rigidly conservative and simplistic—at least until the onset of minimalism and the so-called new tonality.
As a symphonist he has some of the same qualities. The Second (1931), which Bernstein recorded in 1968, made a major impact at the time when it was first performed. Its neo-primitive opening harnesses jazz rhythms in a guarded way, at a time when symphonic jazz was all the rage, but the result comes over as closer to swung Vaughan Williams, with modal passages as well. The second movement of this Symphony even has Elgarian overtones in the string writing. As a symphonist, Thompson has something in common with Rubbra, a tradition continued in Britain with the works of Bernard Stevens and now Robert Simpson. It may not be altogether fair to describe American music in terms of British composers, but it shows the general ambience. At worst Thompson is simply dull, too addicted to sequences, and he suggests other composers. The Second Symphony fails to deliver the promise of its opening movement: the ideas are rarely distinctive.
The Third, written in the immediate post-war years, is more homogeneous, but has never had the impact of the Second. This is presumably its first recording. The opening movement has a Scandinavian gloom, well paced in Schenck's performance to the climax. The second movement is a compact scherzo, but the third is too close to the central section of ''Jupiter'' from The Planets for comfort. It has kept Holst's melody in my mind for days! But Thompson understands continuity, either the smooth step-wise writing of the first movement or the dancing finale, even if his journey is relatively uneventful. These performances by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra under the late Andrew Schenck, also an advocate of Barber, are as convincing as they could be and well recorded too.'