Virgil Thomson: Three Pictures

"'Sea Piece With Birds' ... some four minutes of somber, heaving music, is thick with chromatic chords that move in big parallel blocks, with skittish atonal themes mingling hesitantly above. The atmospheric orchestral colors suggest strangely updated Debussy. A frenetic climax sounds like some ornery blast of Varèse. The composer? Virgil Thomson, best known for his iconoclastic and affecting operas 'Four Saints in Three Acts' and 'The Mother of Us All,' with nonsensically mesmerizing librettos by Gertrude Stein. But Thomson had another side, exemplified by 'Sea Piece With Birds,' the third in a set of impressionistic essays for orchestra written independently over five years and later grouped into a 20-minute suite, 'Three Pictures for Orchestra.' This seldom-played score concludes a fascinating new recording of six Thomson works from the Boston Modern Orchestra Project" (Anthony Tommasini, "'Pictures' Seldom Played," New York Times, 11/14/10).
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