Dominick DiOrio

Arts and culture expert St. John Flynn chats with conductor, composer and educator Dominick DiOrio! Deemed a "triple threat", Dominick is a former member, guest composer and guest conductor of the Houston Chamber Choir!

Watch or listen to this episode here as Dominick recalls his wonderful adventure with the Houston Chamber Choir, including his commissioned work that was later featured in our album Soft Blink of Amber Light, and as he shares his passion for music and teaching. After the episode, indulge in Dominick's favorite songs by listening to his playlist!

In much of the music the composers and arrangers display a considerable degree of harmonic imagination, and the perfect intonation of Willow Consort is an essential ingredient in clarifying the harmonies employed. Equally impressive is the ensemble’s ability to sing in hushed tones without losing tonal body (the opening of Dominick DiOrio’s “I Am” is a good example).

Of the contemporary selections, “Woods in Winter” by the American composer Dominick DiOrio, was among the strongest, with  a striking opening of ethereal harmonies in female voices, as the men sang the words. The work took surprising harmonic turns and led to pianissimo processions of harmonies, sung by the choir with almost preternatural richness and balance.

Sandström--beautifully self-contained and carefully controlled, rich, blended ensemble sound. ...

Gibson--gorgeous music, with elegantly woven electronics that twinkle as the stars do. A chorus as one voice, woven together with artistry and constant care.

Dominick DiOrio is a conductor and composer of mostly choral works, who is also associate professor of music on the conducting faculty at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. His duties on the faculty include leading NOTUS: a select, new-music chamber chorus. NOTUS is one of 24 choirs in the world invited to perform at the 12th World Symposium on Choral Music in Auckland, New Zealand in 2020.

As a composer, Dominick DiOrio is the only person thus far to win The American Prize in both Choral Composition and Choral Performance.

DiOrio, who teaches choral conducting at Indiana University, adapted and sewed together several Whitman excerpts in a sentimental, neo-Romantic style, with thrilling climaxes (crisply marshaled by conductor Col. Jason K. Fettig) that captured the overheated rhetoric of Whitman’s verse. There were literal moments, like the elegiac part for solo trumpet in “The Mystic Trumpeter,” while in the more rhapsodic middle section, the band accompanied the impassioned vocal lines with mysterious tremors of marimba, harp and glockenspiel.

Within a Williams poem, “The Orchestra,” written after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, throbs the humanistic and philosophical point, in these words: “Say to them, Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realize his wishes. Now that he can realize them, he must either change them or perish.” Reich’s music bellows and intones fear and anger and love for life and hopelessness about realities and hope for possibilities. As a package, so brilliantly accomplished by Maestro DiOrio and his fine, stage-filling colleagues, “The Desert Music” was stunning, no less, and quite an achievement as a work of art and in presentation.