Randall Thompson

Contemporary choral music owes a large debt to Randall Thompson. Throughout this century successive composers, each with a slightly more fiendish glint in his eye, have produced choral music that was less and less vocal, melodic, even singable; Thompson has maintained a style of choral writing distinctly congenial to the human voice. For there is more to his music than the lush harmonic changes and expressive dynamics; Thompson is fun to sing.

His understanding of the voice is uncanny, and he learned it, as I am sure he would be the first to admit, at the knee of that greatest of English choral composers, Handel. Somehow, Thompson manages to achieve his end with tessituras that are comfortable and settings that not only express the text, but project it to the audience. I don't quite know how he does it, and neither do his imitators: no matter how much their progressions sound like his, Thompson's understanding of the voice cannot be matched. The Glee Club is often foiled in its aim to get the text across by a bad setting. The singers work their hardest, but the result is ... zip. Although Friday night's texts were all in the program, it really wasn't necessary to follow them. Between the singers' crystalline diction, and Thompson's limpid settings, the words came across.

What texts! Thompson chooses his texts with the care of a sculptor choosing his stone, a calligrapher his nib. His settings of three Horatian odes sound fresh after 41 years: one wonders how those dissonances and lush chromaticisms (which have since become less frequent in Thompson's music) struck listeners in the twenties.

The Peaceable Kingdom, for chorus a cappella, dates from 1936, and is probably the best known of his major works. The texts from the Book of Isaiah are as flamboyant as any I've heard; the choruses, and the work as a whole, epitomize some of his most successful ventures. There are eight verses with tremendously varied settings: a simple hymn; a lament that borders on the sublime (and I'd like to shoot the guy that made the open fifth of the final chord into a major triad); songs of Thanks giving with the longest crescendi since Rossini stopped writing overtures; and a chorus of "Woe unto them that..." that reminds me of the brand of hell fire and damnation I thought you'd only hear when the brothers and sisters got happy in that one story wooden church, the one up the side street back home in Richmond.

Though there isn't room to go into detail on the numbers on the second half of the program, it should be noted that the addition of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra gave Boston its first opportunity to hear Thompson's Last Words of David in its original version with orchestra, and his Frostiana with the orchestration prepared especially for this concert. He uses the winds, brass, and percussion effectively, and treats the strings not only as a body, but as tow choirs that can be separated or combined to produce a rich sound used so rarely in contemporary music.

The singers were in fine voice Friday night. Don't let anyone fool you-it isn't easy music. Have you ever heard a bad chorus sing Thompson? Each of the four parts lies exposed. If one voice sticks out, or one section wanders off pitch by that much, even the Great Tin Ear couldn't miss it. It was a joy to hear Thompson conducting his own music, for he does it well. The Glee Club an Choral Society are to be commended on their blend, tone, and expression, and on their endurance as well (they stood throughout the entire concert).

The HRO played attentively. They thundered when the occasion demanded, or played under the chorus's pianissimo, which was very soft, Randall Thompson's orchestrations are more or less routine work for instrumentalists; the strings played what they had well, the wind solos were good, but not always exactly in tune.

The program began with the Alleluia, probably the best known motet produced in this century. It's sung almost too much, but Friday night, when the Glee Club and Choral Society started it, I thought I could listen to it a hundred times more. Let us hope hat in his retirement, Randall Thompson will write more music that sings and sounds as well as that little piece.