Virgil Thomson candidly and accurately predicted that his posthumous fame as a composer would rest on his two operatic collaborations with Gertrude Stein. He finished the music for their first opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, in 1928. After its 1934 premiere at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Four Saints hit Broadway for some 60 performances–unprecedented for a new American opera.
Not all musicians knew what to make of Thomson’s deceptively simple pump-organ harmonies and catchy hymn-like tunes. Indeed, when I first heard Four Saints as a teenager in the early 1970s, I thought it was a joke, a complete put-on, akin to nursery rhymes with wrong notes and wrong rhythms. It took me a long time to come to terms with Thomson’s plucky self-aware exterior, his imaginative, crystal-clear instrumentation, and the infallible prosody with which he deployed Stein’s madcap language. In any event, the present release constitutes Four Saints’ second complete recording, the first since Nonesuch’s 1981 version.
Aside from an altogether brighter, more forward ambience (especially via multi-channel playback), the new set places the solo voices more forward in the mix, while Gil Rose’s Boston Modern Orchestra Project proves a harder-hitting and less overtly blended ensemble than Nonesuch’s Orchestra of Our Time under Joel Thome, if not so beautifully rounded. As a consequence, you hear all of the text, all of the time.
To be certain, the Nonesuch lineup boasted imposing principals, like Clamma Dale and Florence Quivar as the two St. Teresas, and Gwendolyn Bradley as St. Settlement. Rose’s fine Commère mezzo-soprano Lynn Torgove doesn’t match the late Betty Allen’s tonal luster, and for all of bass Tom McNichols’ superb musicianship and focus, the majesty and presence that the late, great Benjamin Matthews brought to the Compère role refuses to dislodge from my memory. At the same time, Rose’s quicker tempos and more incisively accented large group numbers (the start of Act 3’s Procession, for example) are closer to the spirit and textural diversity distinguishing the classic–albeit abridged–1947 mostly-original cast RCA Victor recording led by the composer.
With its long stretches of declaimed text on single notes and brash diatonic asymmetry, Thomson’s 1927 setting for voices and piano of Stein’s Capital Capitals can be looked at as a prototype for, or “beta version” of, Four Saints. Thomson presided over an exciting, edge-of-seat recording for Columbia Masterworks, but this new traversal benefits from superior sonics and accuracy. I wouldn’t want to be without the Nonesuch Four Saints’ priceless vocal assumptions, yet Gil Rose and company arguably have a better idiomatic handle on what makes the Thomson/Stein synergy tick. An enclosed booklet contains the full sung texts, plus a thoroughly-researched essay by Thomson scholar Steven Watson, whose book Prepare for Saints remains the Four Saints bible.
