DOMINICK ARGENTO Composer PLAYLIST 21 videos

Information on the Performance

• Work Title: DOMINICK ARGENTO Composer   
• Composer: Argento Dominick  
• Libretto: various  
• Venue & Opera Company: various  
• Recorded: various
• Type: Concert Live
• Singers: various
• Conductor: various  
• Orchestra:
• Stage Director:   
• Costume Designer:   

Information about the Recording

• Published by: OoV  
• Date Published: 2024  
• Format: Streaming
• Quality Video: 3 Audio:3
• Subtitles: nosubs  
• Video Recording from: YouTube     FULL VIDEO
•  

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE

Dominick Argento (October 27, 1927 – February 20, 2019) was an American composer known for his lyric operatic and choral music. Among his best known pieces are the operas Postcard from Morocco, Miss Havisham’s Fire, The Masque of Angels, and The Aspern Papers. He also is known for the song cycles Six Elizabethan Songs and From the Diary of Virginia Woolf; the latter earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1975. In a predominantly tonal context, his music freely combines tonality, atonality and a lyrical use of twelve-tone writing. None of Argento’s music approaches the experimental, stringent avant-garde fashions of the post-World War II era.

As a student in the 1950s, Argento divided his time between the United States and Italy, and his music is greatly influenced by both his instructors in the United States and his personal affection for Italy, particularly the city of Florence. Many of Argento’s works were written in Florence, where he spent a portion of every year. He was a professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. He frequently remarked that he found residents of that city to be tremendously supportive of his work and thought his musical development would have been impeded had he stayed in the high-pressure world of East Coast music. He was one of the founders of the Center Opera Company (now the Minnesota Opera). Newsweek magazine once referred to the Twin Cities as “Argento’s town.”

Argento wrote fourteen operas, in addition to major song cycles, orchestral works, and many choral pieces for small and large forces. Many of these were commissioned for and premiered by Minnesota-based artists. He referred to his wife, the soprano Carolyn Bailey, as his muse, and she frequently performed his works. Bailey died on February 2, 2006.

In 2009, Argento was awarded the Brock Commission from the American Choral Directors Association.

Works
Operas
Argento at rehearsal of his opera The Boor in 2017
Argento’s operatic output is eclectic and extensive. He withdrew two early operas, written while he was a student—Sicilian Limes and Colonel Jonathan the Saint. The Boor, written in 1957 as part of his Ph.D. work, was published by Boosey & Hawkes and performed in 2017. He collaborated with John Olon-Scrymgeour on a number of works, including The Masque of Angels; Christopher Sly (1962), based on an episode from The Taming of the Shrew; and The Shoemaker’s Holiday, (1967) a “ballad opera” based on a play by Thomas Dekker.

After the success of Postcard from Morocco in 1971, which had a libretto by Jon Donahue, he received much larger commissions. The University of Minnesota and Minnesota Opera together commissioned The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe in 1975-76, with a libretto by Charles Nolte. As a result of that work, which received wildly enthusiastic reviews, the New York City Opera commissioned him. He composed Miss Havisham’s Fire (1977), with a libretto by Scrymgeour. It was not initially well-received, and Argento revised it into a one-act monodrama, Miss Havisham’s Wedding Night, which the Minnesota Opera premiered on May 1, 1981, at the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, conducted by Philip Brunelle. He revised Miss Havisham’s Fire in 1995 and it has been successfully revived and performed since.

In 1984, the Minnesota Opera commissioned Casanova’s Homecoming, with text by the composer; it went on to a well-received run at New York City Opera. At the insistence of Beverly Sills, then the company’s musical director, the opera was the first in New York City to be performed in English with English supertitles. She wanted to ensure that the audience understood all the jokes. The opera won the 1986 National Institute for Music Theatre Award.

Argento next composed The Aspern Papers (1987) as a vehicle for Frederica von Stade, with his own libretto adapted from the 1888 novella by Henry James. His next opera and arguably largest work to date was The Dream of Valentino, which premiered at the Kennedy Center in 1993. Critic Anne Midgette of The New York Times has noted that Argento’s operas tend to be very well received upon their premieres but lack an “easy popular hook” and are rarely revived.

Song cycles and “monodramas”
Argento’s song cycles are notable for his frequent use of dramatic, unusual text, most often prose that does not have immediately apparent musical possibilities. His works blur the distinction between straightforward groupings of songs and dramatic works, which he terms “monodramas”. His best-known song cycle is From the Diary of Virginia Woolf, with a text he assembled from the book of that title. Written for Janet Baker in 1974, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Music and is performed frequently.

Other prominent works in a similar vein include Letters from Composers (1968), which uses as its text letters written by Chopin, Puccini, and others; Casa Guidi (1983), which sets letters written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning; and A Few Words About Chekhov (1996), which adapts letters by Anton Chekhov.

Argento’s other song cycles are highly varied:

A Water Bird Talk (1974–76) is a one-act monodrama adapted from Chekhov’s “On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco,” with images and passages from John James Audubon’s Birds of America;
The Andrée Expedition (1980) includes journal entries made by Swedish balloonist Salomon Andrée and excerpts from a personal diary and letters of his companion Nils Strindberg during their failed three-man expedition in 1897 to the North Pole by hydrogen balloon; and
Miss Manners on Music (1998) sets to music newspaper clippings by American 20th-century advice columnist Judith Martin (aka “Miss Manners”).
One of the few major song cycles Argento has written that use “traditional” verse as a text is his popular Six Elizabethan Songs. Other solo vocal works by Argento include:

Songs About Spring (1950–55), text by E. E. Cummings, for voice and piano
Ode to the West Wind (1956), text by Percy Bysshe Shelley, for soprano and orchestra
To Be Sung Upon the Water (1972), text by William Wordsworth, for voice, clarinet and piano
The Bremen Town Musicians (1998), text by the composer, a “children’s entertainment” with narrator and orchestra
Major choral works
Argento’s The Masque of Angels (1963) has sections, such as the “Gloria” and “Sanctus”, that are frequently excerpted and performed separately. His next major choral work was The Revelation of St. John the Divine (1968), which sets portions of the Book of Revelation from the Bible; it is scored for male chorus, brass, and an array of percussion instruments.

Peter Quince at the Clavier (1979), a setting of the poem by Wallace Stevens, was commissioned by Pennsylvania State University in honor of the state’s tercentenary (both Stevens and Argento are Pennsylvania natives). For the Dale Warland Singers, Argento wrote I Hate and I Love (1981), with text by Catullus, and Walden Pond (1996), based on excerpts from Thoreau.

In 1987 Argento composed a massive Te Deum that integrates the Latin text with medieval English folk poetry. A Toccata of Galuppi’s (1989), a 20-minute setting of a Robert Browning poem, is one of many works inspired by Argento’s time in Florence. In 2008, the Harvard Glee Club premiered his Apollo in Cambridge, a multi-movement setting of texts by Harvard-affiliated writers of the 19th century.

Other choral works by Argento include:

A Nation of Cowslips (1968), seven bagatelles on nonsense text by Keats
Tria Carmina Pasachalia (1970), an Easter cantata for women’s chorus
Jonah and the Whale (1973), a large-scale oratorio on medieval English texts
Spirituals and Swedish Chorales (1994)
Walden Pond: Nocturnes and Barcarolles (1997, SATB choir, 3 cellos, harp)
Dover Beach Revisited (2003), refers to the poem “Dover Beach” written by Victorian Matthew Arnold; Argento’s work was composed for the Yale Glee Club
Four Seascapes (2004); words of Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Thornton Wilder set to music
Numerous anthems for choir and organ and a cappella motets
Evensong: Of Love and Angels (2008, full orchestra, SSAATTBB choir, two soprano soloists)
Seasons (2014, SATB choir a cappella)
Orchestral works
Argento’s non-vocal output is relatively small; there are no symphonies and just one string quartet, written when he was a student. He produced numerous orchestral suites based on his operas, including Le tombeau d’Edgar Poe (1985), adapted from The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe, and the popular Valentino Dances (1994), from The Dream of Valentino. He wrote two ballets that were fashioned into orchestral suites, The Resurrection of Don Juan (1956) and Royal Invitation (Homage to the Queen of Tonga) (1964). His 1982 Fire Variations was nominated for the Kennedy Center’s Friedheim Award in Music.

Other orchestral works include:

Divertimento (1954) for piano and strings
Variations for Orchestra (The Mask of Night) (1965)
Bravo Mozart (1969), an “imaginary biography”
A Ring of Time (1972) for orchestra and bells
In Praise of Music (1977), a set of “songs” for orchestra
Capriccio ‘Rossini in Paris’ (1985), essentially a clarinet concerto
Reverie (Reflections on a Hymn Tune) (1997)
Other small works for chamber groups of instruments

Quoted from Wikipedia