Suite from "The River" by Virgil Thomson Score - Sheet Music

SKU: PR.613448510

UPC: 680160427048.

The Suite from The River, published twenty years after the release of the film [by Pare Lorentz], is more robust and extrovert than The Plow that Broke the Plains, and in both form and substance more symphonic. Thomson invented several effective themes of his own for this work, and drew further from the collection of hymns and popular ballads he characterized as just the music of the Mississippi Valley. The film traced the use and abuse of the River over a long period of time. The first movement, The Old South, suggests the lavish ante-bellum facade and its troubled underpinnings: the swaggering introductory phrase might be recognized as containing the first four notes of Dixie; among the other motifs in this movement is one Thomson used earlier in his Symphony on a Hymn Tune. Industrial Expansion in the Mississippi Valley is a rollicking scherzo whose principal melodic feature is Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight. Soil Erosion and Floods, the slow movement, is a fairly brisk threnody rising to an impassioned middle section. The Finale is unreservedly outgoing, launched with a jubilant chorale which introduces We Won't Get Home until Morning; this is followed by a scattering of lovely tunes interspersed with ringing fanfares and building to a proclamative statement of the hymn heard in somewhat more modest guise early in the first movement. — Richard Freed.