Dominick Argento News

New York Festival of Song marks its seventh annual residency at the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts with BEL CANTO/CAN BELTO, to be performed on Tuesday, March 17, 2015 at 8:00 p.m. at Merkin Concert Hall.

San Francisco Opera Center and the Merola Opera Program present the 33rd season of the Schwabacher Debut Recitals, beginning February 8, 2015 with soprano Erin Johnson and pianist Sun Ha Yoon at Temple Emanu-El's Martin Meyer Sanctuary in San Francisco.

The New Amsterdam Singers (NAS), led by music director Clara Longstreth, will present New American Romantics, a program of American music featuring poems of Robert Frost, William Butler Yeats, James Agee, Robert Graves, and Thomas Hardy written by living composers. They include Dominick Argento, Donald Grantham, Matthew Harris, Morten Lauridsen, Elizabeth Lim, Ben Moore, and Ronald Perera. The two performances will take place Friday, March 6, 2015, at 8:00 P.M., and Sunday, March 8, 2015, at 4:00 P.M., at The Church of the Holy Trinity, 316 East 88th Street.

The world-renowned Young People's Chorus of New York City (YPC) conducted by Artistic Director/Founder Francisco J. Núñez will be presented today, November 22, at Roseville Lutheran Church by VocalEssence, as part of the 46th anniversary season of Minnesota's acclaimed professional chorus.

Odyssey Opera, a new, Boston-based opera company dedicated to exploring the full spectrum of adventurous repertoire, presents two one-act operas by Dominick Argento (b.1927) at Suffolk University's Modern Theatre.

The world-renowned Young People's Chorus of New York City (YPC) conducted by Artistic Director/Founder Francisco J. Núñez will be presented on Saturday, November 22, at Roseville Lutheran Church by VocalEssence, as part of the 46th anniversary season of Minnesota's acclaimed professional chorus.

Composers, Inc. announces the world premiere of a major new chamber opera MIDDLEMARCH IN SPRING by composer Allen Shearer and librettist Claudia Stevens, based on George Eliot's great romantic novel Middlemarch. The production will be featured as a part of the New Work series at Z Space in San Francisco, for four performances only, March 19-22, 2015.

Cape Town Opera in collaboration with the UCT Opera School will present Argento's POSTCARD FROM MOROCCO. This exotic and colourful one act opera by Pulitzer-prize and Grammy Award winning composer Dominick Argento makes its South African debut at the Artscape Theatre from 19 to 23 November 2014 for five performances only.

Cape Town Opera will present a new production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's comic masterpiece of impetuous love, THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO (LE NOZZE DI FIGARO) in the Opera House at Artscape from today 18 to 26 October 2014.

Odyssey Opera, a new, Boston-based opera company dedicated to exploring the full spectrum of adventurous repertoire, presents two one-act operas by Dominick Argento (b.1927) at Suffolk University's Modern Theatre.

Cape Town Opera will present a new production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's comic masterpiece of impetuous love, THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO (LE NOZZE DI FIGARO) in the Opera House at Artscape from 18 to 26 October 2014. The Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra, under the baton of acclaimed conductor, Maestro Jeremy Silver will accompany this production's talented cast.

This week Cape Town Opera announced the appointment of Marvin Kernelle as the new Cape Town Opera Chorus Master. Kernelle succeeds Albert Horne, who is now Chordirektor and Dirigent at Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden, Germany.

Cynthia Vaughn, founder and director of Magnolia Music Studio-Old Town in Fort Collins, Colorado and co-author of the leading class college textbook and song anthology, The Singing Book, is opening a new music studio located in Tri-Cities, Washington in September 2014.

New York Festival of Song announces 2014-15 season. Four Great Series Return Classic: NYFOS MAINSTAGE at Merkin Concert Hall (4 concerts) Future: NYFOS NEXT at Opera America's National Opera Center (3 concerts) Cabaret: NYFOS AFTER HOURS at Henry's Restaurant (3 concerts) Mentoring: NYFOS EMERGING ARTISTS at North Fork, Juilliard, Caramoor (3 concerts)

Concerts at Kent Town continue this August with three young musicians: Alexander Paine organist, Brooke Window, soprano and piano accompanist Mark Sandon.

Opera Colorado announced today that it will present Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly(November 2014), W.A. Mozart's The Magic Flute (May 2015), Giuseppe Verdi's Aida (November 2015), and the world premiere of Lori Laitman's The Scarlet Letter (May 2016) starring Elizabeth Futral as Hester Prynne. A vital presence in Denver's cultural ecology, Opera Colorado is the Rocky Mountain region's preeminent grand opera company. The Opera's programming includes mainstage productions, artist development initiatives, and education and community engagement programming.

The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts presents the West Coast premiere of A Coffin in Egypt, a new chamber opera in one act, based on the play, A Coffin in Egypt by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Horton Foote, for three performances only tonight, April 23 and April 25 and 27 in the Bram Goldsmith Theater.

Acclaimed Grammy-nominated choral conductor and Los Angeles Master Chorale (LAMC) Music Director Emeritus Paul Salamunovich, whose artistry touched millions of people around the world through recordings, live performances, college and university clinics, and the numerous film scores on which he conducted and sang, has died at age 86 from multiple complications due to West Nile virus.

The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts presents the West Coast premiere of A Coffin in Egypt, a new chamber opera in one act, based on the play, A Coffin in Egypt by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Horton Foote, for three performances only April 23, 25 and 27 in the Bram Goldsmith Theater. A Coffin in Egypt stars mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade, one of opera's most beloved figures, whose formidable bravura has won her wide acclaim. Ricky Ian Gordon, the composer, has also composed The Grapes of Wrath, Rappahannock County, and Orpheus and Euridice. Leonard Foglia, librettist and director, directed Master Class on Broadway and Jake Heggie's Opera Last Acts.

'I'm not a warhorse kind of singer,' mezzo Susan Graham states matter-of-factly. 'A. I'm a mezzo. B. I'm not a character mezzo. C. I'm not a contralto. The iconic opera repertoire for mezzos, Amneris (AIDA), Azucena (IL TROVATORE), even Eboli (DON CARLO)--those kinds of roles aren't my stock and trade because my voice sits high and has a different timbre.' Well, what then is her milieu? It's the likes of Handel, who composed several of the arias she has been singing this winter at the Met, as one of the stars of THE ENCHANTED ISLAND, a kind of Baroque 'jukebox opera.' But it's also Rodgers & Hammerstein's THE KING & I, which she is doing this June at the Chatelet in Paris.