Word: thomson
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...Virgil Thomson...
...arrogance and stupidity in the musical establishment with a perceptive gusto unknown since the critical heyday of George Bernard Shaw. Composer Aaron Copland, his contemporary, calls him "about as original a personality as America can boast." This week, in what is far from the least of his accomplishments, Virgil Thomson turns a hale and peppery...
...occasion was marked earlier this month with a concert performance of Four Saints at Carnegie Hall. Thomson bounded onstage for tumultuous curtain calls, still pink-cheeked and cherubic and grinning impishly. A recording of Four Saints is now being made and is due out next year. A new collection of his writings, A Virgil Thomson Reader,has just been issued (Houghton Mifflin; 582 pages; $25). Convivially holding court in the suite that he has occupied for decades in Manhattan's Chelsea Hotel, the old boy (as he has been fondly called) chats with a stream of visitors while fielding...
...white and blue boulevardier. his native good sense sharpened with Parisian wit, Thomson deftly sidesteps the question of his reaction to all the tributes: "I don't know what my emotions are. I don't give them names. If you give names to your feelings, then you are stuck with them." Chatting with fellow Composer Philip Glass-whose opera Satyagraha has been the most discussed piece of the year-he succinctly bridges the gap between his own down-home aesthetic and Glass's new-wave minimalism: "Glass makes an opera in Sanskrit, and I make an opera...
...Thomson has always been a man of broad artistic sympathies. Four Saints astonished its first listeners with its folksy, hymnlike tunes drawn from the composer's Baptist background and sung by an all-black cast. Although the 1928 work has dated badly-a little of Gertrude Stein is, after all, a lot of Gertrude Stein-it is still a landmark, something that served to define what "American" was between the wars...