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Thompson recently released a disk on which he plays three works in collaboration with the M.I.T. Symphony Orchestra, conducted by David Epstein. Thompson himself has provided insightful jacket notes on the music...
...music on the other side, by two recent Swiss-born composers, Ernest Bloch (1880-1959) and Frank Martin (1890-1974), makes this disk welcome. Bloch's oeuvre contains about a dozen works of avowedly Jewish flavor, the most famous being the Schelomo rhapsody for cello and orchestra (1915). The last of the Jewish works was a set of five Pieces Hebraiques (1951), for viola and piano, three of which Bloch orchestrated the next year under the title Suite Hebraique. The Thompson disk is the only current recording with the revised scoring. Though not from Bloch's top drawer, the work...
...disk entitled "Computer Generations," Thompson performs a work expressly written for him, Synapse for Viola and Computer (1976) by Barry Vercoe (b. 1937), who established M.I.T.'s electronic music studio nine years ago. Thompson brings a needed touch of humanity to a cerebral work that, though serially organized, lacks sufficient aural unity...
...most substantial work on the disk is the D-major transcription of Brahms' G-major violin sonata, Op. 78, published shortly before the composer's death. Experts still dispute whether this version was written by Brahms himself, Julius Klengel, Paul Klengel, or someone else. Some people denounce the transcription; but Brahms himself loved the mellow low range, which makes this version a valuable alternative...
Lastly, Moye pays tribute to our century's greatest cellist by filling out the disk with three short works associated with Casals: the Siloti transcription of the second movement from Bach's organ Toccata, Adagio and Fugue, and Casals' own arrangement of the ever-lovely Faure song "Apres un reve," both of which demonstrate Moye's marvelous legato bowing; and the dashing encore piece Requiebros that was written for and dedicated to Casals by his one-time student Gasparo Cassado...