<div> <div> <b><b>Revisit the Golden Age of classical music in America through the witty and adventurous reviews of our greatest critic-composer</b>: </b>For fourteen memorable years Virgil Thomson surveyed the worlds of opera and classical music as the chief music critic for the <i>New York Herald Tribune</i>. An accomplished composer who knew music from the inside, Thomson communicated its pleasures and complexities to a wide readership in a hugely entertaining, authoritative style, and his daily reviews and Sunday articles set a high-water mark in American cultural journalism. Thomson collected his newspaper columns in four volumes: <i>The Musical Scene</i>, <i>The Art of Judging Music</i>, <i>Music Right and Left</i>, and <i>Music Reviewed</i>. All are gathered here, together with a generous selection of Thomson’s uncollected writings. The result is a singular chronicle of a magical time when an unrivaled roster of great conductors (Koussevitzky, Toscanini, Beecham, Stokowski) and legendary performers (Horowitz, Rubinstein, Heifetz, Stern) presented new masters (Copland, Stravinsky, Britten, Bernstein) and re-introduced the classics to a rapt American audience.</div></div>