Water Bird Talk--UNC Gerrard Hall, Tuesday, June 24, 8pm
An Opera Freely Adapted from On the Harmfulness of Tobacco by Anton Chekov and The Birds of America by J.J. Audubon
The setting is the rostrum of a provincial club on the East Coast of the United States sometime in the second half of the 19th century. The Lecturer, a somewhat absent-minded man in his fifties, begins a lecture on water birds. At the beginnning of the lecture his wife prompts him from offstage with coughing and throat-clearing. She soon leaves in disgust and the Lecturer's talk digresses even further into his home life: his wife is a dominating, ill-tempered woman; he regrets the unfulfilled promises of his youth; and even his daughters make fun of him. At last, the explosion of his slide projector and the return of his wife ends his lecture and he leaves the stage.
Dominick Argento--Composer
Dominick Argento (born October 27, 1927) in Pennsylvania is an American composer best known as a leading composer of lyric opera and choral works. Among his most prominent pieces are Postcard from Morroco, Miss Havisham’s Fire, and The Masque of Angels, and the song cycles Six Elizabethan Songs and From the Diary of Virginia Woolf, the latter of which earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1975. In a predominantly tonal context, his music freely combines tonality, atonality and a lyrical use of twelve-tone writing, though none of Argento's music approaches the experimental avant-garde fashions of the post World War II era. He is particularly well-known for sensitive settings of complex, sophisticated texts.
As a student in the 1950s Argento divided his time between America and Italy, and his music is greatly influenced both by his teachers in the United States and his personal affection for Italy, particularly the city of Florence, where he spends part of every year and where many of his works were written.
He has been a professor (and, more recently, a professor emeritus) at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and he frequently remarks that he finds that city to be tremendously supportive of his work and thinks his musical development would have been impeded had he stayed in the high-pressure world of East Coast music. He was one of the founders of the Center Opera Company (now the Minnesota Opera).
Argento has written fourteen operas as well as major song cycles, orchestral works and many choral pieces for small and large forces, many of which were commissioned for and premiered by Minnesota-based artists. He has referred to his wife, the soprano Carolyn Bailey, as his muse, and she was a frequent performer of his works. She died in 2006.
Scott MacLeod as The Lecturer
A diverse and exciting performer, baritone Scott MacLeod has garnered critical praise in opera houses and concert halls across the nation. Media reviews have called him “impressive” (Pensacola News Journal), “splendid” (OperaOnline) “emotional… equal parts sweetness and swagger” (Mobile Register) and “a voice to enjoy with every note” (Salt Lake Tribune). In addition to these accolades, Mr. MacLeod has been the recipient of many prestigious awards and fellowships. He has performed over 50 roles with some of the nation’s leading houses and abroad, including: Central City Opera, Opera North, Utah Festival Opera, Opera Birmingham, Mobile Opera, Opera Omaha, Des Moines Metro Opera, the Greensboro Opera, the Florence Masterworks chorale, the Tucson Symphony, the North Carolina Symphony, and the National Symphony of Costa Rica.
Recent engagements include the title role in Gianni Schicchi, Schaunard in La Bohéme, Giuseppe in The Gondoliers, Count Almaviva in The Marriage of Figaro, the title role in Dallapiccola’s Il Prigioniero, and William Clark in Opera Omaha’s debut of Dream of the Pacific. He can be heard in the role of Apollo in the world-premiere recording of John Eccles’ Semele. He has taught voice and theatre as a guest at several prominent institutions and is in demand as a clinician
and instructor. Mr. MacLeod is a graduate of Northwestern University and holds a Master’s degree from Florida State University. He is a native of Michigan and lives in North Carolina with his wife, Rebecca, a music education professor at UNC Greensboro’s acclaimed School of Music.