Word: virgil
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...week before Christmas, the New York Herald Tribune's Virgil Thomson composed an open letter to Santa Claus (alias Billy Rose). All that Composer-Critic Thomson wanted in 1949 (from the hands of Producer Rose): "A really modern [medium-sized] operatic repertory theater ... a quality operation." As for grand opera, said Thomson: "Leave all those outsize 19th Century works" to the Metropolitan, "till they and the Met collapse together...
From the money usually spent on soloists, the Philharmonic's smart Conductor Robert Whitney, urged on by Mayor Charles P. Farnsley, commissioned six new ten-minute works for $500 each by Virgil Thomson, Darius Milhaud, Roy Harris, Italy's Gian Francesco Malipiero, Spain's blind Joaquin Rodrigo, Louisville's own Claude Almand. Four of the composers were promised another $500 apiece for conducting their own world premieres...
Last week, Louisville, swelling with local pride, heard its second premiere. While a packed audience in Columbia Auditorium clapped a hearty welcome, Virgil Thomson strode to the podium, ducked his round, balding head, and stared briefly ahead with his pale blue eyes. Then, brisk and businesslike, he drove Louisville's 50-piece Philharmonic through his Wheat Field at Noon, a series of well-plowed variations on two twelve-tone themes. When the ride was over, Louisville gave him an ovation. As a bonus, Composer Thomson led the orchestra in another little thing he had written, Bugles and Birds...
...finicky bachelor of 52, Virgil Thomson comes from Missouri, but got to Manhattan by way of Harvard and Paris. Since he repatriated himself and joined the New York Herald Tribune, he has become America's most readable, and perhaps its best, music critic. Concertgoing by night, and composing by day in his dim, Victorian rooms in Manhattan's old Chelsea Hotel, he has also become one of the few U.S.-born composers who can (or cares to) catch the sights, sounds, smells and flavors of the U.S. in his music-one reason that documentary moviemakers like Pare Lorentz...
Worried Times Publisher Norman Chandler had already hustled his brother Philip over to the Mirror as general manager, though Virgil Pinkley was still publisher. A week ago Chandler enlisted Times City Editor Hugh Lewis to prescribe a tonic for the Mirror...