daron aric hagen

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Sappho Songs

song cycle for two female voices and cello (2004)

Premiere

buy the music
23 September 2005
Church of Saint Matthew and Saint Timothy, New York, NY
Gilda Lyons, soprano / Elaine Valby, mezzo / Robert La Rue, cello

Instrumentation

S,Mez,vc

Duration

32'

Text

Sappho (trans. by Mary Barnard), adapted by the composer (E)

Program Note

The Sappho Songs were composed during the autumn of 2004 during a residency in Italy and completed in New York City in December of the same year. First, I asked Robert La Rue to choose a handful of Sappho poems and to arrange them into an emotionally and psychologically satisying sequence. Then I adapted the poetry (in the process superimposing six of the poems in order to form dialogues and inserting a reprise of one of them) as I would the text of a living librettist. The cycle was composed for Elaine Valby, Robert La Rue, and Gilda Lyons, who premiered it on 23 September 2005 in New York City.

— Daron Hagen, 2005