Dominick Argento, now in his sixties, is a leading conservative in American composition. In fact he has occupied this position for so long that he has had the satisfaction of seeing the new romanticism catch up with him. His background was Italian and so was some of his training. His influences included Hugo Weisgall and Dallapiccola and later, at the Eastman School, American romantics such as Howard Hanson, whose Second Symphony makes such an impact in Slatkin's recording on EMI. Argento's ideas are not as full-blooded as that, but his operas have been much admired. The song-cycle based on Virginia Woolf's diaries was first performed by Dame Janet Baker and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975.
It was an ingenious idea to comb Woolf's diaries to create a portrait of her life as she moved towards suicide in the grim years of the Second World War. Virginia Dupuy, a full and flexible mezzo, rises to the challenge of characterization, where the writer's stream-of-consciousness technique is represented by a kind of continuous recitative. I find it difficult to get used to this type of musical language as a personification of Virginia Woolf, if that is what Argento is doing. It seems crude and unsubtle for such a delicate sensibility. But it has to be recognized that Argento's eclecticism is carefully considered: the contrasted styles for the images in the third song; the Roman tea-shop suggestions of the fifth; but Hardy's Funeral seems inflated, too operatic for Woolf's response.
Warren Benson, from the same generation as Argento, obtained a text from the novelist John Gardner for his cycle, which has a mixed instrumental accompaniment of horn, cor anglais, marimba and cello. Songs for the End of the World is intended as a ''one-woman short opera'', concerned with a woman's love for her husband and children becoming transformed in old age. There is plenty of idiomatic writing for the horn, which Benson used to play—the work was commissioned by the International Horn Society—but the vocal writing is too tied to the delivery of its text. Cohesion lapses overall when one or two instruments have long stretches on their own. But there is atmosphere: perhaps it needs the stage.'