Thomson was an excellent film composer because he had a rare ability to respond to visual and literary stimuli. His response to Gertrude Stein in the operas Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) and The Mother of us All (1947) was uncanny. As a composer he was content to create a musical counterpart of her idiosyncratic style. For much of his life Thomson also composed musical portraits, working in front of the sitter and responding to what he saw. Again, as a music critic, he had a special ability to react to the music of other composers. This ability paid off when he had the chance to compose for films—and Thomson often made the point that he had used American folk sources in his film scores some years before Copland made such tactics the basis of his own film scores and what became the international career of the popular ballets.
The Plow that broke the Plains (1936) was Thomson's first film score: The River came in the following year and both were directed by Pare Lorentz: the black-and-white images of both are uncannily memorable with this music. There have been several recordings of the suites taken from both films, which were not premiered until 1943 but this is the first time that the complete scores have been performed. Richard Kapp, with the help of David Samuel Barr and the composer, went to a lot of trouble to get corrected material and has even performed the music with live narration taken from the film script. As with the ballets of Copland—now done complete in Slatkin's EMI recordings—this proves worthwhile, although film music is naturally of even lower density, or it would not work as a soundtrack.
The Plow has three numbers not in the suite—''The Homesteader'' (track 10); ''War and the Tractor'' (track 11); and ''Wind and Dust'' (track 14) as well as a fugue tacked on to the Prelude (track 7). Familiar tunes, including All People that on Earth do dwell, drift in and out as Thomson helps himself to anything he likes. There's an anticipation of Copland when the third movement, ''Cattle'' (track 9), quotes Old Paint which features in the Saturday Night Waltz from Rodeo. Kapp and the Philharmonia Virtuosi (the CD booklet has Viruosi!) give a vivid impression of Thomson's Americana—compare their blues (track 12) with the much less idiomatic performance by the New London Orchestra under Ronald Corp (see below). There are extra numbers in The River too: tracks 2 and 3.
The two complete film scores make a valuable coupling and bring this strand in Thomson's applied music, where he was a real pioneer, into circulation in a new way. The orchestra sounds well and so does the recording.'