Program Note:

In 1984, when I first moved to Manhattan, I assumed that I would spent the rest of my life there. As it happened, after 28 years, the father of two, my partner and I moved upriver to Rhinebeck to raise our kids. The Hudson River Valley is our home, and we love it.

That young man forty years ago, aboard the Staten Island Ferry, bagel and steaming coffee in hand, pressed in on all sides by fellow commuters, would exult in the salt air and the Manhattan skyline as the sun rose, drawing strength from the great City poised at the Hudson’s estuary. Now, past middle age, he draws strength alone in silence, sitting on the bank of the same river seventy miles to the north at sunset, watching his oldest son draw his oar with his mates in a shell. From far out their voices come to him across the water like memories.

Commissioned by the Albany Symphony to honor the Hudson River Quadricentennial with a large work for chorus and orchestra featuring the Albany Pro Music Chorus, I called it a symphony, but its concerns are more humble, more personal than those customarily associated with a symphony. I wrote about the river as it flows in my heart, and not in the pages of history or geography books. Accordingly, I couldn’t help but begin it with an adaptation of the wise, poignant, closing section of Mark Twain’s memoir, Life on the Mississippi:

When I had mastered the language of this water, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. All the poetry had gone out of the majestic river! I still keep in mind a certain wonderful sunset when it was new to me. A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood. A solitary log came floating black and conspicuous; in another place the surface was broken by boiling rings; they were as many tinted as an opal. The shore on our left was densely wooded and high above a tree waved a single leafy bough that glowed in the unobstructed splendor flowing from the sky. I stood like one bewitched…. But I began to cease noting the glories wrought upon the river’s face. The sun means wind tomorrow, the log means that the river is rising, the boiling means a bluff reef, one that will kill somebody’s steamboat some night…. All the romance had gone out of the river. Since then I’ve pitied doctors from my heart. For what does the lovely flush in a beauty’s cheek mean but the “break” that ripples above some deadly disease? Does he ever see her beauty at all? Or does he simply view her professionally? Doesn’t he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?

I closed it with an adaptation of the great Brooklyn poet Walt Whitman’s words from Specimen Days:

This is the hour for strange effects in light and shade enough to make a colorist go delirious. Long spokes of molten silver sent horizontally through the trees (now in their brightest, tenderest green), each leaf and branch of endless foliage a lit-up miracle…. Then lying prone on the interminable grass and giving the blades individual splendor unknown at any other hour. One broad splash on the water, with many a rippling twinkle, off-set by the rapidly deepening shadows behind. Something is gained but something is lost.

Selected Reviews:

Daron Hagen’s Symphony No. 4: River Music, which received its world premiere, was inspired by the Hudson River from Hagen’s many commutes north on Amtrak from New York City. The 80-voice Albany Pro Musica, under the able direction of David Griggs-Janower, sang expertly on two of the three movements with texts from Mark Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi” and Walt Whitman’s “Specimen Days.”

Although Hagen had not intended the work to be site specific, the outer two movements with the chorus were very riparian in scope. The lyrical lines were long with expansive, grand gestures — very like the river is in the south part of the state, occasionally Coplandesque in its openness. The chorus sang much of the time in unison — sometimes first the women and then the men — in accessible ranges that never strained their voices. The moods were peaceful and flowing with flutes as birdsong in the third movement. The orchestra sounded luminous.

The second instrumental movement was choppy and churning, very fast and with bright brassy colors. This was supposed to be where the Hudson meets the ocean. Conductor David Alan Miller was precise with the multi-metered, rhythmic music. The orchestra was a little less even but still energized.

The orchestration was clean and Hagen chose colors admirably suited to his inspiration. His movement endings had great panache. The large crowd seemed to like the work, which besides its flowing pastoral quality was often like a sunny, warm embrace. Even better, Hagen’s work was able to hold its own with one of the great staples of the repertoire: Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1.

— Geraldine Freedman, dailygazette.com, Schenectady, NY, 9 May 2009

Receiving its premiere, Daron Hagen’s Symphony No. 4 “River Music” honored the Hudson River Quadricentennial and featured the Albany Pro Musica singing texts of Walt Whitman and Mark Twain. Though the composer said the piece reflected his struggles with the onset of middle age, the characteristics of water - surging, pooling, cascading and continually flowing onward - still came through beautifully. Midlife seems to be giving Hagen the confidence to be conservative in his writing, for his score was tuneful and old fashioned in a mid-20th century American way.

The delivery of texts was often rhythmically staggered among the vocal sections, again bringing to mind the rippling effect of water. The first movement emphasized female voices, often in a rather limited midrange, but the men had their moments in the finale, singing in a gentle and affecting whisper.

The piece was at its best in the purely orchestral sections. Birdcalls and budding flowers came through in the more tender moments, while a central movement was a gentle urban scherzo. After several boisterous themes were introduced, they piled on top of each other with clarity but never obvious cleverness. If only more composers could deliver the ASO pieces as well crafted, intelligible and concise.

— Jody Dalton, Albany Times Union, 5/10/09