Louisville Raises a Crop

To most of the smaller U.S. symphony orchestras, a big-name guest soloist is a fellow who brings in a lot of money at the box office--and takes most of it away with him as he leaves the stage door. And for the Louisville Philharmonic Orchestra's money, Hollywood-priced soloists, playing the same old "boxoffice concertos" didn't advance music much anyway. So, last January, Louisville said goodbye to all that--and started saying a big hello to composers, who could be had for less.

From the money usually spent on soloists, the Philharmonic's smart Conductor Robert Whitney, urged on by Mayor Charles P. Farnsley, commissioned six new ten-minute works for $500 each by Virgil Thomson, Darius Milhaud, Roy Harris, Italy's Gian Francesco Malipiero, Spain's blind Joaquin Rodrigo, Louisville's own Claude Almand. Four of the composers were promised another $500 apiece for conducting their own world premieres.

Last week, Louisville, swelling with local pride, heard its second premiere. While a packed audience in Columbia Auditorium clapped a hearty welcome, Virgil Thomson strode to the podium, ducked his round, balding head, and stared briefly ahead with his pale blue eyes. Then, brisk and businesslike, he drove Louisville's 50-piece Philharmonic through his Wheat Field at Noon, a series of well-plowed variations on two twelve-tone themes. When the ride was over, Louisville gave him an ovation. As a bonus, Composer Thomson led the orchestra in another little thing he had written, Bugles and Birds: A Portrait of Pablo Picasso.

A finicky bachelor of 52, Virgil Thomson comes from Missouri, but got to Manhattan by way of Harvard and Paris. Since he repatriated himself and joined the New York Herald Tribune, he has become America's most readable, and perhaps its best, music critic. Concertgoing by night, and composing by day in his dim, Victorian rooms in Manhattan's old Chelsea Hotel, he has also become one of the few U.S.-born composers who can (or cares to) catch the sights, sounds, smells and flavors of the U.S. in his music--one reason that documentary moviemakers like Pare Lorentz (The Plow That Broke the Plains) got him to compose their sound tracks. A suite from Thomson's latest film score, for Robert Flaherty's Louisiana Story, has already been given in concert form by the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Why had he now set wheat to music? The idea fascinated him, said Composer Thomson. It was a "problem of representing by music, which is made out of motion, something almost motionless."

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