Virgil Thomson ─ Music Chronicles 1940-1954: The Musical Scene / The Art of Judging Music / Music Right and Left / Music Reviewed 1940-1954 / Other Writings

Revisit the Golden Age of classical music in America through the witty and adventurous reviews of our greatest critic-composer: For fourteen crucial years in the middle of the twentieth century, Virgil Thomson surveyed the worlds of opera and classical music from his vantage as the nationally syndicated music critic for the New York Herald Tribune. An accomplished composer who knew music from the inside, Thomson communicated its joys and complexities to a wide readership in a clear and winning style, and his daily reviews and Sunday columns set a high-water mark in American cultural journalism. Thomson collected his newspaper pieces in four volumes: The Musical Scene (1945), The Art of Judging Music (1947), Music Right and Left (1951), and Music Reviewed: 1940?1954 (1966). Long unavailable to the general reader, all are gathered in this volume by Pulitzer Prize?winning music critic Tim Page, together with a generous and judicious selection of Thomson’s uncollected writings. Here is an all-access pass to the New York concert world at an especially eclectic and exciting time, when an unrivaled roster of great conductors?Koussevitzky, Toscanini, Mitropoulos, Bernstein?and legendary performers?Horowitz, Heifetz, Stern, Rubenstein?introduced some of the most memorable works of such modern masters as Copland, Messiaen, Milhaud, Britten, and Stravinsky.

TIM PAGE won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for his writings in the Washington Post, for which he was a music critic from 1995 to 2008. A professor of music and journalism at the University of Southern California, he is co-editor of Virgil Thomson’s Selected Letters and editor of the Library of America edition of Dawn Powell’s novels.