The Plow That Broke the Plains and The River. The original Pare Lorentz films with newly recorded sounds of the classic scores by Virgil Thomson. Post-Classical ensemble, Angel Gil-Ordóñez, musical director; Joseph Horowitz, artistic director; Floyd King, narrator. Naxos DVD 2.110521, 2007.

Among all of the ways the U.S. government has attempted to communicate to its citizens, few have had their aesthetic style praised as much or as highly as Pare Lorentz's two films, The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937). That moment in the 1930s and 1940s when motion pictures were employed by the federal government may be hard to imagine in today's media world, where near-instantaneous and continuous reporting has become de rigueur. Both of Lorentz's films (which he called "films of merit" or "melodramas of nature") were constructed to disseminate information about New Deal agencies and policies, the resettlement Administration in the case of The Plow and the Farm Security Administration (among others) in the case of The River. Besides their striking cinematography, editing, and narration, their musical scores by Virgil Thomson are also remarkable examples of musical rhetoric and irony. While concert suite arrangements of both film scores have been widely performed, the films themselves have been somewhat elusive. This new release of the films has an entirely new soundtrack consisting of not only a superb rendering of Thomson's music by the Post-Classical ensemble but also new sound effects and new narration (of the existing words) by Floyd King, who replaces Thomas Chalmers's original low-voiced intonations.