Daron Hagen

Composer Daron Hagen's memoir, Duet with the Past, was released this spring. A rare look at the depth and breadth of an artist's experience, we had a chance to ask the author a few questions and get an understanding of how the book came to be.

November and December are always busy months for concerts! Here's a run-down of just some of what our composers have been up to.

The Boston-based chamber music group Radius Ensemble performed a concert with works by E. C. Schirmer composers Elena Ruehr and Libby Larsen. Both works were programmatic in nature, with Ruehr's Lucy titled after the famous Australopithecine. Larsen's work, Yellow Jersey, depicts racing through the Tour de France.

Among composers with premiers this month were Daron Hagen, Paul Gibson, and Gwyneth Walker.

Paul Gibson's piece Ring Out, Wild Bells! premiered on December 3 at Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles, performed by all five choirs of the Los Angeles Children's Chorus and members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The piece will be performed again in two concerts December 17 with the Children's Chorus and the Pasadena Symphony.

Daron Hagen (b. 1961) was recognized in 2014 by the American Academy of Arts and Letters with an Academy Award citing his "outstanding artistic achievement and acknowledging the composer who has arrived at his or her own voice." A Lifetime Member of the Corporation of Yaddo, a Trustee of the Douglas Moore Fund for American Opera, and Chair of Composition for the Wintergreen Festival Music Academy, he serves as a Distinguished Mentor for Composers Now, and has served as artistic director of the Seasons Music Festival, and as president of the Lotte Lehmann Foundation. Hagen made his debut as a stage director with Kentucky Opera and has directed productions at Symphony Space in New York City, the Actors Theatre of Louisville, and the McCarter Theater in Princeton (New York Stories, The Antient Concert, A Woman in Morocco). Hagen studied composition with Ned Rorem at the Curtis Institute and David Diamond at the Juilliard School, then worked extensively as a copyist

Daron Hagen returns to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for a three-day residency during which he will work with composers, conductors, and singers. Engagement includes a masterclass for singers, collaborative pianists, composers, and conductors during which he will coach performances of standard repertoire arias and art songs alongside contemporary repertoire from the perspective of a working mid-career stage director, opera composer/librettist, and conductor.

UrbanArias presents a new production of the Hagen-Muldoon opera Shining Brow at the Paul Sprenger Theatre of the Atlas Performing Arts Center in Washington, D.C. This new production has been dubbed the Usonian Version. It reinstates choruses and other material previously excised by the composer for the Fallingwater Version staged (by director Jonathan Eaton and conductor Robert Frankenberry) and toured last season by Pittsburgh Festival Opera. Two other versions of the opera exist: the original opera house version commissioned and premiered by the Madison Opera,

Daron Hagen has joined the artist faculty at Roosevelt University's Chicago College of Performing Arts (CCPA). As part of Hagen's new relationship with CCPA, he will bring his latest project, “Orson Rehearsed,” a multi-faceted collaborative work examining in non-linear narrative the Orson Welles story, to Roosevelt, where he plans to engage students, faculty, and guest artists in its development and staging at CCPA in September 2018. Hagen is slated to connect CCPA to many guest artists like the Fifth House Ensemble and members of the New Mercury Collective.

On September 23, pianist Yana Reznik joins Chamber Music on the Fox in a live performance of Daron Hagen's Piano Concerto, No. 2: Chaplin's Tramp. The performance occurs alongside a screening of Charlie Chaplin's silent film, The Tramp, as part of the Elgin Short Film Festival. Hagen wrote the new score for the centennial of the classic film.

Baritone Dr. Cory Schantz will perform Daron Hagen's cycle Songs of Experience alongside the music of Jacques Ibert, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Mitch Leigh. The performance is part of a Guest Faculty Voice Recital at the University of South Alabama on September 24. Songs of Experience are six musical settings of texts by Walt Whitman, Gardner McFall, Sara Teasdale, Stephen Dunn, Emily Lawless, Emily Dickinson.Dr. Cory Schantz, baritone, is Director of Opera and Assistant Professor of Voice at Reinhardt University in Waleska, Georgia. His teachers have included Marilyn Horne, Sharon Mabry, John Gillas, Kenneth Shaw, and Linda DiFiore. He has sung under the batons of notable conductors such as Arthur Fagen, Joseph Resigno, Craig Kier, and Keith Chambers.