Word: virgil
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...Manhattan audience, looking unseasonably plushy, last week cooed and clapped its way through the revival of a cockeyed opera-Four Saints in Three Acts. The author of its words, expatriate Gertrude Stein, is still expatriate in Occupied France. The author of its music, Expatriate Virgil Thomson, now repatriated in Manhattan, supervised the second showing...
Last week a small orchestra sat on the Town Hall stage, with most of the principal saints in evening dress, the chorus in monkish robes. After seven years Virgil Thomson's tunes still sounded engaging, well-made, occasionally trivial. The most charming aria was still that sung by St. Ignatius: "Pigeons on the grass alas. Short longer grass short longer shorter yellow grass," etc. But Four Saints in Three Acts still owed a lot to its original Cellophane...
...Virgil Garnett Gaines Thomson, 44, is a chub-cheeked, baldish, chirrupy, witty, exquisitely cultivated native of Kansas City. A piano-prodigious only son, he went to the same high school as Playwight-Critic Richard Lockridge, Contralto Gladys Swarthout, Actor William Powell. Virgil Thomson went to Harvard, where he wore kid gloves to scull on the River Charles, and played the organ in Boston's King's Chapel. He spent a year after graduation on a grant from the Juilliard Foundation, then went to Paris, to go hungry. "I hope," he declared, "I shall never again have to earn...
Future Coffee Concerts include: an oratorio version of the chichi-melodious Gertrude Stein-Virgil Thomson opera, Four Saints in Three Acts; Spanish music (with the bagpipers); voodoo dancers and Brazilian Soprano Elsie Houston; a "Jubilee" of gospel-singing Negro quartets (some with three or five members) and the guitar-playing bishop. The bishop, the Rev. Utah Smith, wears paper wings, lately inspired Composer-Critic Thomson to write: "As a stimulator of choric transports he incites the faithful to movements and behavior not very different from those of any true jitterbug. Myself, I found it distinctly pleasant to hear good swing...
...STATE OF Music-Virgil Thomson -Morrow...