Here we go with one of my favorite discs of American music. Ignore the clunky cover - it has nothing to do with the music.
The works inside are two ballet scores written for the New York City Ballet. Hershy Kay's Western Symphony on very familiar western tunes, and Virgil Thomson's Filling Station, one of his lesser-known pieces from the 1930s.
The cover cites the choreographers as well as the composers - George Balanchine along with Kay, and Lew Christensen along with Thomson. I don't recall another record doing this for ballet scores - after all you are not getting the ballet along with the music itself.
Kay was mostly known as an orchestrator, and this piece is delightful in that regard. Thomson's contemporaneous works were The River and The Plow That Broke the Plains, which have been recorded several times. There is a modern recording of Filling Station, but I don't think it could be much better than this 1954 version by Leon Barzin and his New York City Ballet Orchestra, which was made shortly after the premiere of the Kay-Balanchine ballet.
The back cover of the record has informative notes by Balanchine, which I've included in the file. It also has a fuzzy photo of Barzin smoking a cigarette and leading the band.
NEW LINK (JUNE 2014)
