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Thomson: Four Saints
BMOP/sound
1049
Recording Release Date 
October 2016
SACD Recording 
SACD
Recording Length 
Disc 1: 55:40
Disc 2: 51:48
  • Boston Modern Orchestra Project
  • Gil Rose, conductor

Profundity is absurd and absurdity profound in this great 20th-century modernist collaboration.

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News and Press

[CD Review] Harkening Back To 'Four Saints' During The Harlem Renaissance

The next time you see a magpie in the sky, I hope you'll remember Four Saints in Three Acts.

That there are a prologue and four acts, and 18 saints — maybe 19, depending on how you count — needn't detain us.

Four Saints in Three Acts is an opera by Virgil Thomson (1896-1989) to a libretto by Gertrude Stein (1874-1946).

What we have here is a collaboration between an aesthete Southern Baptist out of Kansas City and an American writer living in Paris whose works people talked about and no one understood.

In 2016, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, conducted by Gil Rose, performed Four Saints in Three Acts, producing a terrific recording. The text and music are addictive, as I'm sure Thomson intended them to be. (Find the recording on Amazon and ArkivMusic.)

WOSU Radio Full review
[CD Review] BMOP's New Releases: Rose by any other Name

Continuing its impressive scheduled releases of new music as well as of overlooked twentieth century works, Gil Rose's Boston Modern Orchestra Project has recently completed two new recordings, David Rakowski's Stolen Moments and Piano Concerto No.2 and Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts and Capital Capitals. Under its eight-year-old “BMOP/sound” independent record label, these two CDs are more evidence of the significant role of Rose in providing access to important contemporary compositions

South Shore Critic Full review