Hagen: Suite for Piano

"Suite for Piano has four thematically related movements. The first movement, Toccata, is a virtuosic rondo whose first theme is a fugue subject I wrote as a student at Juilliard during the early eighties and always wanted to have some fun with, and a jazzy little riff based on an octatonic scale. The second movement, Sarabande, is written in the spirit of Leonard Bernstein’s Anniversaries and is a musical portrait of my mother. Aria began as the very first sketch for my opera Amelia; in the story, a little girl sings this music as an apostrophe to the stars. The final Medley takes a fragment of the traditional Irish ballad The Croppy Boy and subjects it to some brutal compositional chiaroscuro as it is intercut with ideas from the previous movements. I am a pianist, so I set myself specific challenges for each movement: the first highlights touch and velocity, the second voicing, the third a long singing line and pedaling, and the last dramatic shifts in color, tempo, and dynamics."

—Daron Hagen