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Rosalind Rees SOPRANO The story of the wide-eyed lad from Kansas City The first five brief works range from among the earliest in the Thomson choral canon—De Profundis, (Kansas City, MISSOURI, thank you; as Virgil put it (1920/revised 1951), O My Deir Hert (1921/revised 1978), and Tribulationes Civitatum (1922)—to “You did not speak of Kansas City, Kansas often… two later efforts, Welcome to the New Year (1941) and The Holly and the Ivy (solo version 1955/choral or go there unless you had business”), who became version 1963). the toast of Paris via Harvard, one of America’s most Thomson had been exposed to the classics of Medieval and Renaissance counterpoint at influential music critics from his decades’ long perch Harvard—his early setting of De Profundis reveals just how strongly he took to the style—but it was at the New York Herald Tribune and a truly unique only after coming under the influence of Mademoiselle in Paris that this earlier introduction began to and productive composer, is almost hackneyed bear real fruit. The purity of line and careful attention to counterpoint in Tribulationes Civitatum, now, but still bears that “only in America” cachet. written at the end of his first year in Paris (August 1922), is witness enough of immediate impact: Drenched in the secular and sacred vernacular strangely enough, the quintessentially Gallic union of emotion and rationality that typified much of music of his environment, Virgil Thomson was Boulanger’s teaching is not entirely unrelated to the straightforward address of the composer who was exposed to a whole new world in the Harvard of the to create the Symphony on a Hymn Tune or The Mother of Us All. O my deir hert dates from 1921, the late teens and early twenties (he didn’t get to year Thomson began studying with Boulanger. The text is attributed to Luther, and Thomson uses a Harvard until he was twenty-three). Among the charming sixteenth century translation (the same century is the source of The Holly and the Ivy), but important mentors he met there were the famous for all we know, it may be the work of an anonymous English poet of the period. Archibald Davison, choir director since 1912, and Even Thomson acknowledged the importance of the deep concern Boulanger took with fledgling his faculty adviser, Edward Burlingame Hill. composers’ works: “Suddenly [the student] sees that which has caused him pain, struggle and much But Thomson’s real adventure began some two years after his arrival in Cambridge, when he uncertainty unveiled before him, without malice or invidious comparisons, as a being to which he has joined the Harvard Glee Club on a European tour. He had just been awarded a Paine Fellowship, and given birth. Naturally he is grateful. His work has been taken seriously, has received the supreme planned to stay on for a year in Paris after the tour ended in the late summer. There he studied with Nadia compliment of having its existence admitted to be real.” In his pre-Boulanger De Profundis, written at Boulanger (the Glee Club had attended the official opening of her American Conservatory in Fontainebleau Harvard in 1920, and revised in 1951, we see the promise; in Tribulationes, we begin to see the on June 26. 1921) and developed his life-long attachment for the City of Lights. And while his later fulfillment. Much more, and greater, music was to follow. And much of the greatness of that music was claim to have spent the fifteen years before 1940 in Paris is not technically true—Thomson actually helped into life by the midwife of the Rue Ballu. spent just over half of the 1930’s in New York—he always considered himself a citizen of the three It was only the arrival of the German Army in Paris in the spring of 1940 that forced Thomson cities that most influenced his life and his music: Kansas City, Paris and New York. —and twelve suitcases—to abandon his second spiritual home and return to New York for good. He It was as a long-term resident of the Chelsea Hotel in New York that Gregg Smith and his Singers had taken up a friend’s offer to rusticate in a village in the Pyrenees as the Nazis took his beloved Paris, got to know the redoubtable Virgil, in the later decades of his long life (born in 1896, he died at the age and in July, on trains “running again, with German officers now manning the stations,” he made his way of 92 in 1989.) The present CD is an offering of gratitude for Virgil’s support and friendship, as well as to Biarritz, where he met up with his friend Man Ray, also fleeing “war-torn Europe.” They reached New a concise overview of his work in the choral field—along with a brief excursion into his solo output. York together via Lisbon (shades of Casablanca!), and almost immediately Thomson was approached by Geoffrey Parsons “the editorial-page editor and overseer of all things cultural” at the New York Herald Tribune about taking on the vacant position of music critic. He was hired by that fall and remained at choreography, and its sophisticated John Houseman direction, Virgil’s opera had a well-deserved succès the paper until 1954. Composing, of necessity, took a back seat during his first years at the Trib, until d’estime. A New York run followed, after which the composer, in Houseman’s words, “sailed away to report he got his New York “sea-legs,” and only shorter works emerged during the next few years. to Miss Stein in Paris.” Welcome to the New Year dates from September 1941. That fall Thomson composed three brief Sensational it may well have been, but afterwards none of its principals could find steady work. children’s choruses, The Bugle Song to a text of Tennyson, the Surrey Apple-Howler’s Song with a Houseman’s ever-fertile mind had lighted upon the idea of a not-for-profit theatre company to be traditional text, and Welcome, a setting of a poem by Eleanor Farjeon. The three were not apparently named after the mythical Phoenix, ever rising from its own ashes: more of which anon. But that published until the 1960’s. Farjeon was a well-known English author of children’s books, whose first same summer of 1934 Thomson was lucky enough to snag a commission for a Mass from the New- effort, Nursery Rhymes of London Town, dated from 1916, when she was thirty-five. She won several York-based League of Composers. awards in the mid-1950’s, and died in 1965. (In her entry in Who’s Who she listed as her recreations The Adesdi Chorus of the Dessoff Choirs, the group designated to premiere the Mass, was an all- “cooking and cats.”) women’s group, and the Mass was conceived for women’s voices, although the composer permits tenors The Holly and the Ivy began its life as a solo song written for the great American soprano Phyllis to join the sopranos and basses the altos, a suggestion the Singers take up in this recording. Thomson Curtin in 1955. With the composer at the piano, she premiered it on August 25 that year at the Carnegie once commented that “women’s voices in choral singing inherently do not give as sharp and clean an Recital Hall. Eight years later, Thomson recast the work as an SATB chorus. Thomson has created a attack as do men’s voices.” Perhaps one reason he calls for the percussion that makes the Mass so completely new setting for the familiar sixteenth century text, first published by Joshua Sylvester in 1861. memorable was to help its intended singers in this regard. When he returned to composing in the late 1940’s, Thomson did not focus solely on choral or dra- Thomson turned his face away from much of his Four Saints style here, actively seeking out— matic genres. The Songs from William Blake and Four Songs to Poems of Thomas Campion, for in John Cage’s words—“an evocation of ancient times, rich in poetic ambiguity, architectural symmetry instance, both dating from 1951, show his devotion to composition for a solo voice, albeit with varying and rugged strength.” This “almost medieval austerity of mood” is relieved by the eerie presence of accompaniments—in the Blake songs, a full orchestra, in the Campion, the interesting grouping of the percussion: snare drum, bass drum, tom-tom and cymbal, played with an array of different sticks, harp, clarinet and viola. at the precise direction of the composer. Paul Bowles was at the premiere on April 10, 1935, and came Campion, trained as a lawyer and a doctor, was, first and foremost, one of the great lyric-writers away fairly impressed. He found the Mass “serviceable and quasi-streamlined; it is better and more of the late Elizabethan age—and no mean composer in his own right. (All the texts Thomson sets, save personal music than Four Saints.” The percussion gave the work “real punch,” although Bowles felt it “Rose-Cheek’d Laura,” were originally published with Campion’s own tunes.) The twentieth century was used at times simply because it was there.