Word: virgil
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Peru's multi-octaved Yma Sumac, whose extraordinary voice ranges easily from a mockingbird soprano to a deep, womanly baritone, gave a concert in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall, so impressed the Herald Tribune's Composer-Critic Virgil Thomson that he wrote: "She belongs in the great houses of opera." Said Yma, who claims to be 24: "It's too late for me to do it . . . [Besides,] I make very much more money than if I sang in two cr three operas a year for the Metropolitan...
Adaptor Valency's English version is excellent prose. But dramatically, Ondine suffers from too much prose-or at any rate, too little poetry. Virgil Thomson's evocative incidental music suggests a tale better adapted to opera or ballet. For, however ironic and sophisticated, Giraudoux has not brought a new dimension, or even any very striking overtones, to an old story. What the tale gains in philosophical embroideries it more than loses in fairy-tale magic and lyrical feeling. It seems neither simple nor complex enough; in a certain prettiness and lifelessness, it suggests not the court magician...
...Along Eliot's five feet of authors: Milton, Emerson, Virgil, Robert Burns, Goethe, Adam Smith, William Penn, Dante, Darwin, Homer. Among the omissions T.R. protested: Aristotle, Thucydides, Chaucer, Moliere...
...Although the Figaro performance got good notices, the Met had a pretty rough week. Critic Virgil Thomson of the Herald Tribune took aim at the impressionistic new stage set with which Rudolf Bing & Co. have tried to brighten Don Giovanni, and let go with both barrels: "In this presentation, Don Giovanni lives just across the street from Donna Anna, but she does not recognize him when he tries to rape her ... All this residential proximity turns the story into a news item about how two ladies got rid of a criminal neighbor...
...Mirror's publisher, Virgil M. Pink-ley, ex-U.P. general manager for Europe, knew what to do about that. He turned its front page around and set out aggressively to give the Mirror a crisp, sensational style ("All news stories are written too long, including those in the Mirror"). Los Angeles, said Pinkley, "needs a fighting newspaper [and] the Mirror is anyone's fist in a good fight." The paper picked its fights carefully, more often to woo new readers than for any lofty civic motives. Mirrormen breezily campaigned against everything from "black-market baby rackets...