A couple of days ago we shared a review of the performance of Dominick Argento's new piece Evensong: Of Love and Angels, so today thought we would give you the program details of this piece!
Dominick Argento: Evensong: Of Love and AngelsThe Cathedral Choral Society
Washington National Cathedral, Washington, D.C.
Elizabeth Futral, soprano
Nelson James LePard Reed, treble
The Very Reverend Samuel T. Lloyd III, reader
J. Reilly Lewis, conductor
WORLD PREMIERE RECORDING!
Commissioned by the Society in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Washington National Cathedral, this piece also serves as a moving tribute to the memory of Argento's wife, Carolyn Bailey Argento, who died in 2006.
Threnody—orchestra prelude
Preces: Phos Hilaron—treble (an Angel), chorus (the Afflicted)
Psalm 102—chorus a cappella
The Lesson—reader
Sermon—solo sprano (Homilist)
Meditation—orchestral intermezzo
Canticle: Nunc Dimittis—chorus
Prayer/Lullaby—solo treble (the Angel)
Anthem—chorus
Program Details
The Music, by Dominic Argento
BACKGROUND
In the summer of 2005, my wife, Carolyn, was hospitalized with an undiagnosed neurological ailment. After several months in an intensive care unit, she spent the following six months in a Bethesda Rehabilitation Center in Minnesota. During this period, I was contacted by Reilly Lewis, who wished to commission a work to commemorate Washington National Cathedral’s 100th anniversary. Highly flattered, I nevertheless replied that I intended to spend every day at my wife’s bedside until she recovered, and thus had neither will nor energy to compose music. Persistence by Dr. Lewis and others did not change my mind.
What did change it was Carolyn herself. When she was a young child, her father had taken her to visit the Cathedral, an experience she had never forgotten. Largely because of this wonderful memory, she wanted me to accept the commission. I told her that I would consider the commission after she recovered and was back home. She never recovered.
After her death in February 2006, Dr. Lewis renewed his request. I told him that I probably would never compose again, least of all a celebratory kind of work that the Cathedral’s 100th anniversary seemed to call for. He astutely turned the tables on me: What about a work honoring your late wife? I concluded it would have pleased Carolyn to know that I had accepted the commission.
FOREGROUND
On the 180 consecutive mornings I walked into the Rehabilitation Center, the name Bethesda above the entrance brought to mind the passage in John 5 which speaks of the angel that troubled the water and the sense of hope it quickened in the afflicted who surrounded the pool waiting—like me—for a miracle of healing. Angels were Carolyn’s favorite icon, and she collected them wherever we traveled. Throughout her illness, I kept remembering that angel and hoping for a miracle. When I felt I was ready to write Evensong, I wanted it to be, as the title says, Of Love and Angels.
Normally, a choral Evening Prayer service is a hodgepodge of musical pieces— some old, some new, nothing standard except the traditional order or sequence of its parts. I wished to compose an evening service unified from beginning to end with recurring themes and motives. This even entailed writing the texts of the nonliturgical pieces (Sermon and Anthem) and altering the Phos Hilaron and Prayer texts. The first three notes heard are C, B, and A (Carolyn Bailey Argento).
The final three chords concluding the piece fifty minutes later are also based on those letters. These and other variants of them are used throughout the work although not always in recognizable forms.
The Composer: Dominick Argento
One of America’s leading composers and librettists, Dominick Argento has been hailed as the most eminent creator of lyric opera in the United States. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for the song cycle From the Diary of Virginia Woolf commissioned by the Schubert Club of St. Paul. In 2004, he received a GRAMMY® award for best classical contemporary composition for Casa Guidi, five songs for mezzo-soprano and orchestra, recorded by Frederica von Stade and the Minnesota Orchestra.
Argento earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Peabody. He went on to receive his Ph.D. from Eastman School of Music, where he studied with Alan Hovhaness and Bernard Rogers. After a year in Florence, where he studied with Luigi Dallapiccola on a Guggenheim Fellowship, Argento accepted on three days’ notice what he expected to be a temporary post teaching music theory and composition at the University of Minnesota. During his four-decade tenure there, he was named Regents’ Professor, the university’s highest honor.
Over forty years, in which he has written more than sixty works, he has been commissioned by nearly every arts organization in Minnesota, most notably the Plymouth Music Series (now VocalEssence) founded by his former student Philip Brunelle.
Evensong: Of Love and Angels is a crypto-memorial to his beloved Carolyn. He began work on September 6, 2006, their wedding anniversary; he put on the finishing touches exactly one year later. “I suppose it was inevitable I would get back, even after vowing not to write anymore,” he said. “It fulfills something in me.”
C-B-A: Remembering CAROLYN BAILEY ARGENTO (1930-2006)
For fifty-one years, Carolyn Bailey Argento was her husband’s most influential adviser and critic. She studied voice at Peabody, where she was the youngest student ever to receive a personal scholarship. There she met and married fellow student Dominick Argento. In 1958, they moved to Minneapolis, where he taught at the University of Minnesota.
“When I would go off to the university,” Argento recalls, “Carolyn would practice in the studio and my notes were on the piano there. When I’d come back in the evening, on the margins of all these pages would be: “Too high,” “Where does she breathe?” “How many times are you going to ask for that note?” And I would ask, “Was anybody in my studio today?” “No,” she’d say.
“In a way, that’s how I learned to write vocal music. I never intended to write for voice. I started out to be what I thought would be an instrumental composer. And she made a vocal composer, an operatic composer out of me.”
Carolyn premiered many works by her husband before retiring in the 1970’s. She died after a long struggle with an
indeterminate neurological illness.
