Artist

Artistic Roster

Dominick Argento

composer laureate

Pulitzer Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Dominick Argento is considered America’s preeminent composer of lyric opera. One of the most significant forces in Minnesota’s classical music community for the past 50 years, Argento is the Minnesota Orchestra’s composer laureate, the first composer to hold such a position with an American orchestra.

Born in York, Pennsylvania, in 1927, Argento studied at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore and earned a Ph.D. from the Eastman School of Music. He received Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellowships that allowed him to study in Italy and complete his first opera, Colonel Jonathan the Saint. In 1958 he joined the faculty at the University of Minnesota, where he taught until 1997 and now holds the rank of professor emeritus.

The great majority of Argento’s music is vocal, whether in operatic, choral or solo context. Among his major song cycles are Letters from Composers (1968); From the Diary of Virginia Woolf (a 1975 work for which he won the Pulitzer Prize); The Andree Expedition (1983); and Casa Guidi (1983), commissioned by the Minnesota Orchestra. A Few Words About Chekhov and Walden Pond were both premiered in 1996.

Since the early 1970s Argento’s operas, which have always found success in the U.S., have been heard with increasing frequency abroad. His operas include Postcard from Morocco (1971), The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe (1976), Miss Havisham’s Wedding Night (1981), Casanova’s Homecoming (1984)—described by Opera News as “a masterpiece,” The Aspern Papers (1988) and The Dream of Valentino (1994). Among Argento’s more recent works are Four Seascapes for chorus and orchestra (2004); Three Sonnets of Petrarch for baritone and piano (2007); Evensong: Of Love and Angels (2008), composed in honor of his late wife Carolyn Bailey and premiered by the National Cathedral of Washington, D.C., in celebration of its 100th anniversary; and Cenotaph (2009) for chorus and orchestra, commissioned by the American Choral Directors Association for its 50th anniversary and premiered in March 2009.

In 2002, the Minnesota Orchestra released a compact disc of Argento’s works on the Reference label under the baton of Eiji Oue, including Casa Guidi, featuring mezzo Frederica von Stade, and Capriccio for Clarinet and Orchestra, with Burt Hara, the Orchestra’s principal clarinet. The disc won a Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition, an honor given to a work composed within the last 25 years and released for the first time. The Minnesota Orchestra last performed Casa Guidi in September 2007 under Osmo Vänskä’s direction.

September 2009