Search - Gregg Smith Singers :: Virgil Thomson: Heaven is Music

The story of the wide-eyed lad from Kansas City who became the toast of Paris via Harvard, one of America s most influential music critics from his decades long perch at the New York Herald Tribune and a truly unique and productive composer, is almost hackneyed now, but still bears that only in America cachet. It was as a long-term resident of the Chelsea Hotel in New York that Gregg Smith and his Singers got to know the redoubtable Virgil in the later decades of his long life (born in 1896, he died at the age of 92 in 1989.) The present CD is an offering of gratitude for Virgil s support and friendship, as well as a concise overview of his work in the choral field along with a brief excursion into his solo output.