By Celia R. Baker
Salt Lake Tribune
The words "chamber music concert" set up certain expectations. You might imagine a staid evening of classical music with no visual effects, no drama and, definitely, no laughing. The Utah Symphony opens its 2008-09 chamber season with a work that defies those expectations.
Dominick Argento's "A Water Bird Talk" borrows an idea from a story by Anton Chekhov, in which a man speaking on the harmful effects of tobacco embeds the woes of his personal life within his lecture. But Argento, a living American composer, puts a different spin on the story.
The speaker - actually a solo singer - is telling his audience about the habits of shorebirds, using slide projections from John James Audubon's book Birds of America to illustrate the lecture. Argento uses the medium of chamber opera to capture a tragicomic moment of personal discovery in the lecturer's life.
Utah Symphony Music Director Keith Lockhart describes the result as a sort of psychological meltdown for the speaker. "Gradually, you begin to realize that he's putting more of his own self, his own dissatisfactions with his marriage and children, into his lecture. It slowly devolves into chaos as he falls apart," Lockhart said. "Basically, the audience becomes the no-doubt-confused group that comes to hear a charming lecture about birds and gets something they weren't expecting."
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