A sonorous, solemn orchestral movement, Dominick Argento's Reverie is an excellent work to display a top-level orchestra's control of nuance and orchestral blend. It is also a reverent and moving piece of music. A native of York, PA, born in 1927, Argento studied at the Peabody Conservatory and the Eastman School of Music. The latter was one of the most conservative training grounds for future composers at the time and Argento developed a highly lyrical style, mainly staying clear of atonality, serial composition, and other avant-garde pre-occupations. He settled in the Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN, area after the establishment of the Tyrone Guthrie Theater, part of a plan of development in the arts that helped spark an explosion of new music activity in the upper Midwest. Although particularly noted for his vocal music and operas, Argento also has an important catalog of orchestral and instrumental compositions. He has had a good relationship with the Minnesota Orchestra under four music directors, has composed at least seven compositions on its request, and is the only person ever to be named "composer laureate" of that organization. Reverie, Reflections on a Hymn Tune is the first work he composed as composer laureate. The orchestra requested the work for performance on a 13-city European tour scheduled for 1998 and specifically asked that it display the virtuosity of a large, modern orchestra. The music director, Eiji Oue, also wanted it to be based on a tune that would be familiar to both European and American audiences. Argento turned to one of his favorite hymn tunes, which is known as Ellacombe. Its definitive form dates to its appearance in the 1869 Hymns Ancient and Modern, but its first appearance in print is in German: in 1784, it was included as the tune to the hymn Ave Maria, klärer under lichter Morgenstern in the Songbook for the Ducal Catholic Royal Chapel of Wirtemburg. American and English Protestant worshippers will likely be familiar with it as the tune for at least ten different hymns. Among the best-known of these are Rejoice, Rejoice, Believers, I Sing the Power of Mighty God, O Day of Rest and Gladness, and The Day of Resurrection! Earth Tell It Out Abroad. Argento had the last-named use of the tune in mind. Considering the nature of his use of this familiar theme, Argento rejected the idea of doing a theme and variations on it. "...[A] bit too facile," Argento explained in his contribution to this work's program notes. He did keep a modern trend in variation-form music, which is to reveal the main theme by stages until it appears in its true form at the end of the work. The ten-minute work can well be described as an extended symphonic development. Since the identity of the main theme is obscured at the beginning, Argento opens with a dark, brooding music. The music slowly builds in confidence until the Easter hymn peals out to end the music's journey from darkness and doubt to light and faith.

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