Casa Guidi (album)

Dominick Argento, photographed by King Elder in 2016

Joseph Stevenson reviewed the album in Classics Today. In 1983, he wrote, the English conductor Neville Marriner had urged the Minnesota Orchestra to commission Dominick Argento to compose a song cycle for the operatic mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade. Argento, who found prose more sympathetic to his idiom than verse, had decided to set excerpts from the letters that the English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning had written to her sister while living a blissful life with her husband, the poet Robert Browning, in an apartment in Casa Guidi, a house in Florence, Italy. Von Stade had sung the cycle so often - if usually with piano or chamber group accompaniment rather than in the orchestral version of its first edition - that she "virtually becomes Elizabeth when she sings it". Her performance on the album had a good claim to be definitive, "capturing a supreme vocal artist near her peak in her most characteristic repertoire". Her voice remained almost what it had been when she made her first records in the early 1970s.[3]

In Praise of Music was also the fruit of a commission by the Minnesota Orchestra, in this case to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of its formation. In crafting his suite, Argento had taken themes from a range of different cultures and from a range of different periods in history. "The result is dazzlingly diverse as it moves from Japanese court music to Tunisian street music (and other equally unlikely juxtapositions) seemingly without effort".[3]

Elizabeth Barrett Browning with her son Pen in 1860

The album's other work, Capriccio for Clarinet and Orchestra, was commissioned by the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra. In truth, it was a clarinet concerto, but Argento was so in awe of Mozart's concerto for the instrument, its slow movement in particular, that he preferred not to give his piece a name that might invite comparisons with it. Argento had subtitled his work "Rossini in Paris" because it was partly inspired by Gioachino Rossini's Péchés de vieillesse ("Sins of old age"). Argento's music did not appropriate any of Rossini's melodies, but responded to the general feeling of what he had written. The Capriccio was light of heart but not light in substance - it was a "virtuosic, full-scale" work, and its slow movement and Mozart's could be spoken of in the same breath. Burt Hara's performance as the soloist was "exciting and good-humoured".[3]

All in all, the album scored ten out of ten, and its engineering was as impressive as its music. Reference Recordings' HDCD represented "the state of the art in standard CD production", and actually sounded better than most Super Audio CDs. It was highly recommended.[3]

Anthony Burton reviewed the album in BBC Music Magazine. Casa Guidi, he wrote, reflected the glowing contentment of the life that Elizabeth Barrett Browning had enjoyed with he husband during their years in Florence. Frederica von Stade's performance of the cycle did not find her in quite as fresh a vocal condition as when she had premiered it eighteen years previously, but she was as easy to like as ever, and she delivered the "highly singable" music that Argento had composed for her "with great authority".[4]

The Capriccio for Clarinet and Orchestra was "essentially light music blown up to concerto length", but its gentle last bars worked well, and Burt Hara was a fluent soloist. In Praise of Music developed tunes from various places and times into "a sequence of 'songs for orchestra' of Respighi-like brilliance". The Minnesota Orchestra was "magnificent" throughout. Reference Recordings' engineers has created a "broad yet detailed sound-picture", although some listeners would find the gulf between the album's quietest and loudest passages too extreme for domestic comfort.[4]

The album won a Grammy award for the best contemporary classical composition of 2003,[5] and was nominated for a Grammy for the year's best classical vocal solo performance .[6]

• Frederica von Stade (b. 1945), mezzo-soprano (tracks 1–5)
• Burt Hara, clarinet (tracks 6–8)
• Minnesota Orchestra
• Eiji Oue (b. 1956), conductor[1]

• J. Tamblyn Henderson, Jr, producer
• Giancarlo Guerrero, associate producer
• Marcia Martin, executive producer
• Keith O. Johnson, recording engineer
• Paul Stubblebine, editing and mastering engineer[1]