Rightly nominated for a 2004 Grammy award for Best Choral Performance, this disc offers an ideal combination of evocative, accessible new music with impeccable choral artistry. Minnesota composer
Dominick Argento is best known for his operas, which have taken his reputation far beyond the U.S. Midwest and attracted commissions from top international singers and companies. His choral music is perhaps a bit operatic, with vivid pictorial qualities and a bent toward representing the declamatory speech of a single individual. Three works are included: I Hate and I Love (1981, on poems by Catullus), A Toccata of Galuppi's (1989, setting Robert Browning's great meditation on Venice's decline), and Walden Pond (1996, a cycle of five excerpts from Thoreau's prose). A distinctive small group of instruments accompanies each piece; the Browning setting features a harpsichord playing what may have been the music Browning had in mind, while the chorus and a string quartet weave modern reflections, perfectly akin to the poet's retrospective gloom, around Galuppi's pre-Classical piece. The structure of that work, especially, offers close listeners plenty to chew on, yet
Argento also creates vivid pictorial imagery that will appeal even to casual hearers.
Argento's choral harmonies, with close dissonances and serial-inspired music resolving to passages of open intervals, are expertly handled by Minnesota's
Dale Warland Singers, now in the final stages of an impressive 40-year career. Listeners couldn't ask for a better valediction.