Virgil Thomson (1896-1989)
Vernal Equinox
Ah
Sunflower!
Susie Asado
Preciosilla
Five Songs from William Blake
Portrait of F.B. (Frances Blood)
La Valse Grégorienne
Deux soeurs qui ne sont pas soeurs
The Tiger
Le Berceau de Gertrude Stein ou Le Mystère de la rue de Fleurus
Les Soirées bagnolaises
La Belle en dormant
Trois Poèmes de la Duchesse de Rohan
Air de Phèdre
Commentaire sur Saint Jérome
Le Singe et le Léopard
At the Spring
Dirge
Shakespeare Songs
Consider
Lord
The Bell Doth Toll
Remember Adam’s Fall
John Peel
Look
How the Floor of Heaven
If Thou a Reason Dost Desire to Know
Praises and Prayers
Three Sentences of Solomon
Five Phrases from the Song of Solomon
Oraison funèbre de Henriette-Marie de France, Reine de la Grande-Bretagne
Messe pour voix seule
My Shepherd Will Supply My Need
Two By Marianne Moore
Go to Sleep
Gabriel Liebowitz
The Courtship of the Yongly-Bongly-Bo
Chamber Music
A Lullaby for Margaret Wheeler
From Sneden’s Landing Variations
What Is It?
Go to Sleep
Pare McTaggett Lorentz: A Lullaby
The Cat
Tres Estampas de Niñez
Go to Sleep
Alexander Smallens
Jr.
Mostly About Love
Collected Poems

The Florestan Recital Project

Sarah Pelletier, soprano
Lynne McMurtry, contre-alto
William Hite, ténor
Aaron Engebreth, baryton
Alison d'Amato, piano
Linda Osborn, pianiste
John McDonald, percussion

These discs offer the most complete recorded collection of works for voice and piano of Virgil Thomson (1896–1989), one of the most important American composers of the twentieth century. Thomson wrote songs throughout his career and they offer a unique window into his changing musical concerns and his compositional evolution. Since this recording includes works previously unpublished and unrecorded, several of which are substantial in themselves and important to his development as a composer, it makes possible a more complete understanding of his work. Among the major rediscoveries is the grandly expressive and beautiful Oraison Funèbre, which, without sounding like it at all, evokes Satie’s Socrate. Thomson wrote that the great song composers—Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, Mahler, Faure, Debussy, Duparc, Ravel, and Poulenc—accomplished their miracles through their ability to make the music “not only of equal quality with the verse but also its mate. It gets inside a poem and stays there, intertwined unforgettably, never to be thought of henceforth as not a part of the whole idea.” He contrasted these works with the songs of Purcell, which he thought, although very beautiful and expertly done, nonetheless did not fuse the music and text—the music was merely “decorative.” Thomson’s songs run the gamut of his classification. If one sets out to set words to music in a way that deliberately avoids interpreting or illustrating them, one probably sets up a situation where the music and words are separable. So the early Stein settings, the Shakespeare Songs, and the Old English Songs may (or may not) be very beautifully and elegantly decorative, but it is difficult not to think of the music of Mostly About Love or Praises and Prayers, or the Blake Songs as anything other than an inseparable part of the whole. There the music gets right inside of the words, and right inside of us.