Dominick Argento

condition (record/cover): NM / EX- (bent corner)

Dominick Argento was one of the most significant and least polemical American opera composers of the postwar era - a figure who committed without apology to an extended lyrical tradition at a moment when such commitment placed him conspicuously outside the academic avant-garde, and who was rewarded for it with a Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for From the Diary of Virginia Woolf. Trained at the Peabody Conservatory and in Florence with Luigi Dallapiccola - an encounter that deepened his engagement with the possibilities of vocal writing without pushing him toward serialism - he built a career at the University of Minnesota that was almost entirely focused on music for the human voice.

Jonah And The Whale, a music-drama for soloists, chorus, and chamber ensemble, draws on medieval mystery play traditions and demonstrates the range of Argento's theatrical thinking: not grand opera but a more intimate and concentrated form, rooted in the ancient and the ritual. One of the rarer items in his discography.