Childe Virgil in Operaland

By Michael Walsh

TITLE: LORD BYRON

COMPOSER: VIRGIL THOMSON

LABEL: KOCH INTERNATIONAL CLASSICS

THE BOTTOM LINE: Thomson's cheery, uncomplicated score is at odds with the poet's flamboyant life and works.

Virgil Thomson was a first-rate music critic, able author, brilliant dinner- party conversationalist and world-class gadfly, but he wasn't much of a composer -- which is, alas, primarily how he thought of himself. Turning his back on nearly every major compositional technique of the 20th century, with the notable exception of pastiche, Thomson wrote archly naive, perversely | wholesome music -- tonal, uncomplicated and almost completely unmemorable.

Thomson's creative reputation today rests primarily on his operas -- notably the groundbreaking 1928 Four Saints in Three Acts, to a libretto by Gertrude Stein, and The Mother of Us All (1947) -- as well as on the 1928 Symphony on a Hymn Tune and the film score The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936). But the work that has long intrigued Thomson's admirers is his last opera, Lord Byron, which premiered at the Juilliard School in 1972.

The Dada classic Four Saints hangs onto the fringe of the repertoire by virtue of its pigeons-on-the-grass-alas text by Stein and Thomson's proto- minimalist, oompah-pah score. Even so modest a renown is likely to elude Lord Byron, just given a handsome first recording by conductor James Bolle leading the Monadnock Festival Orchestra and a cast of mostly unknowns.

Probably no opera could do justice to its subject's tempestuous 36 years. Jack Larson's static libretto focuses in flashback on Byron's eccentric amatory escapades; the action is framed by the efforts of Byron's friends to win him a place in Poets' Corner. Of his more dramatic travels, battles and death at Missolonghi there is scarcely a word. Such a conception might have worked had Thomson been a composer of passion and power, had he been able to write music commensurate with Byron's words and deeds -- had he been, in short, the Verdi of Otello or the Berg of Wozzeck. But he wasn't. (The score, which incongruously quotes both Did You Ever See a Lassie and Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms, is like The Rake's Progress without the wrong notes.) And so there Lord Byron sits, as fresh, buoyant and uncomplicated as a summer day in the composer's native Kansas City. But not nearly as up to date.