Word: thomson
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...apotheosis of sophistication-style and manner without content," wrote Brooks Atkinson for the New York Times. Said Critic Robert Sylvester of the gum-chewing Daily News: "I liked that thing back in 1934 and I liked it even better last night." So last week, after 18 years, the Virgil Thomson-Gertrude Stein opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, had critics and audiences in a froth again...
Revived on Broadway for a two-week brushup before opening at Paris' international Exposition of the Arts next month, Four Saints got a brilliant production, with Composer-Critic Thomson himself conducting. Like some abstract paintings, it was pretty to look at-and in this case agreeable to listen to-even though it made no sense...
...music of Thomson, the onetime Missouri church organist who went to Paris to study composition, is expertly tailored, but out of wholly familiar cloth. Handel might have composed most of it in an off moment, especially if he had lived in Missouri in the 20th century...
...sustain its mood. It becomes a half-farcical, half-melodramatic vaudeville, and its people finally go home less changed themselves than as though changes of character awaited them there. There is less a failure of logic than of magic, which is the more pronounced since the production-in Virgil Thomson's atmospheric music and Cecil Beaton's almost oppressively charming sets-so much stresses the fairy-tale note...
...Balanchine's 73rd ballet was a smash success, his 74th two nights later was as close to an unqualified flop as Balanchine ever comes. Bayou, danced to a thin and repetitious suite from Composer-Critic Virgil Thomson's Louisiana Story film score, was simply not Classicist Balanchine's meat. His adventure in Americana was little more than tired cliche...