Debut Recording of Dominick Argento's 'The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe' Now Available

BMOP/sound Releases Debut Recording of Dominick Argento’s 1976 Opera The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe

Performances by Odyssey Opera, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and Peter Tantsits, Led by Gil Rose

Available August 29, 2025

 

 

Boston, MA (For Release 08.29.25) — Hailed by The New York Times as “one of the nation’s most intriguing opera companies,” Odyssey Opera, in partnership with the acclaimed Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), today released the debut studio recording of Dominick Argento’s The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe on their GRAMMY Award-winning in-house label, BMOP/sound. Recorded in Poe’s birthplace of Boston, Massachusetts, this two-act masterpiece offers the latest iteration of a work that had fallen into obscurity. Performing the virtuosic title role of Edgar Allen Poe is tenor Peter Tantsits.

 

“Dominick Argento is, for me, one of the true heroes of American opera,” says Gil Rose, conductor and artistic director of both Odyssey Opera and BMOP. “His music is of such high quality that it’s kind of a crime that his praises are not sung even louder. This score showcases, an artist burning brightest during the latter part of his life. We invite everyone to enjoy this remarkable music by a master of contemporary America opera!”

Taking its point of departure from Poe’s bizarre and subsequent deadly sail at sea, Poe takes audiences on a hallucinatory voyage of discovery. In 1849, the ill and feverish Poe—his creativity and inspiration in the doldrums after his wife Virginia’s death two years prior—sailed from Richmond to Baltimore. Less than a week later, he died, dissolute and destitute, at the age of 40.

 

Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer Dominick Argento (1927-2019) created some of the more successful American stage works and songs cycles of the 1970s and ‘80s. Commissioned by the Minnesota Opera in 1974 to write an opera in honor of America’s Bicentennial, Argento settled on the subject of Edgar Allan Poe, seemingly the first American artist to achieve international significance. The composer noted that after learning about “the mysterious voyage that led to the author’s death—as bizarre as any story Poe himself had written—Charles Nolte (1923-2010) was eager to do the libretto. Shaping a libretto, given the many characters in Poe’s writings and his life, plus the poetry we might incorporate, was a lengthy affair, requiring quite a few months before the libretto would be exactly what I wanted.”

 

The premiere garnered rave reviews: “Poe is Argento’s eighth opera and as fine as any ever written by an American” (TIME); “Looking back in decades to come, the spring of ’76 may mark the coming of age in American operas” (Opera News); “a distinct success” (The New Yorker). Although it played in Europe and was heard in three U.S. cities, it vanished for more than three decades until 2024 when Odyssey Opera and BMOP resurrected its full-length iteration in Boston with its New England premiere. “It was Gil Rose and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) that made Argento’s opera most plausible. The opening timpani taps, even before Rose set foot onstage, promised a haunting evening ahead. Piquant trumpet solos, ethereal harp, chimes now distant now close, consistently contributed to the heavily textured atmosphere.” (Musical America)

 

About Odyssey Opera     
Founded in 2013 by artistic director/conductor Gil Rose, Odyssey Opera presents adventurous and eclectic works that affirm opera as a powerful expression of the human experience. Its world-class artists perform the operatic repertoire from its historic beginnings through lesser-known masterpieces to contemporary new works and commissions in varied formats and venues. Odyssey Opera takes its audience on a journey to places they’ve never been before.

About Gil Rose      
Gil Rose is one of today’s most trailblazing conductors, praised as “amazingly versatile” (The Boston Globe) with “a sense of style and sophistication” (Opera News). Equally at home performing core repertoire, new music, and lesser-known historic symphonic and operatic works, “Gil Rose is not just a fine conductor, but a peerless curator, sniffing out—and commissioning—off-trend, unheralded, and otherwise underplayed repertoire who nevertheless holds to unfailingly high standards of quality. In doing so, he’s built an indefinable, but unmistakable, personal aesthetic” (WQXR). A global leader in American contemporary music, GRAMMY Award-winner Rose is the founder of the performing and recording ensemble, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), who “bring an endlessly curious and almost archaeological mind to programming…with each concert, each recording, an essential step in a better direction” (The New York Times), as well as the founder of Odyssey Opera, praised by The New York Times as “bold and intriguing.”

 

About BMOP          
The Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) is the premier orchestra in the United States dedicated exclusively to commissioning, performing, and recording music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A unique institution of crucial artistic importance to today’s musical world, BMOP exists to disseminate exceptional orchestral music of the present and recent past via performances and recordings of the highest caliber. Founded by Artistic Director Gil Rose in 1996, GRAMMY Award-winning BMOP has championed the works of composers whose careers span nine decades. Each season, Rose brings BMOP’s award-winning orchestra, renowned soloists, and influential composers to the stage of New England Conservatory’s historic Jordan Hall in a series that offers orchestral programming of unrivaled eclecticism. Musical America’s 2016 Ensemble of the Year, BMOP was awarded the 2021 Special Achievement Award from Gramophone Magazine as “an organization that has championed American music of the 20^th and 21^st century with passion and panache.” The musicians of BMOP are consistently lauded for the energy, imagination, and passion with which they infuse the music of the present era.

About BMOP/sound         
BMOP/sound, BMOP’s independent record label, was created in 2008 to provide a platform for BMOP’s extensive archive of music, as well as to provide widespread, top-quality, permanent access to both classics of the 20th century and the music of today’s most innovative composers. BMOP/sound has garnered praise from the national and international press.

It is the recipient of a 2020 GRAMMY Award for Tobias Picker: Fantastic Mr. Fox as well as nine GRAMMY nominations, and its releases have appeared on the year-end “Best of” lists of The New York Times, The Boston Globe, National Public Radio, American Record Guide, DownBeat, WBUR, NewMusicBox, and others. Admired, praised, and sought after by artists, presenters, critics, and audiophiles, BMOP and BMOP/sound are uniquely positioned to redefine the new music concert and recording experience. Launched in 2019, BMOP's digital radio station, BMOP/radio, streams BMOP/sound's entire catalog and airs special programming.

 

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Dominick Argento: The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe (#1107)

BMOP/sound | Release Date: August 29, 2025

For more information on BMOP/sound, please visit BMOP.org.