Program Note:

Commissioned to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and JoAnn Falletta’s 25th anniversary as music director, with the generous support of Scott Bieler, City of Light is a tone poem inspired by the thrum of electric energy and the thrill of illumination, whether it be the hydroelectricity generated by Niagara Falls to power the lights and industry of one “City of Light,” Buffalo, or the crackling synapses of an Einstein’s mind — the surging intellectual and philosophical power of secular humanist insights first ginned up in another “Ville-Lumière,” Enlightenment-era Paris, or the spiritual illumination suffusing the Sufi mystic Rumi — the light that makes the shadows plain in Plato’s cave or the lightning that struck the key hanging from Benjamin Franklin’s kite — the spiritual essence of animism or the energy that powers the execution of the code sending ones and zeros back to us from the Voyager spacecraft — or the “subtle electric fire” that compels our hearts to beat.

Reviews:

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A daringly swift traditional Beethoven Ninth and an evocative modern tone poem, beautifully recorded.

Daron Hagen’s City of Light, which rounds out this release, was commissioned to celebrate the Buffalo Philharmonic’s 90th anniversary and JoAnn Falletta’s 25th year as music director. The piece is designed to depict Buffalo via “the thrum of electric energy and the thrill of illumination,” reflecting the hydroelectricity of Niagara Falls to power the lights and industry of the city. The idiom is tonal and rather romantic, beginning with a swirl of energy not unlike the opening of Arthur Benjamin’s Storm Clouds Cantata, (but without the menace that Alfred Hitchcock used to set up a political assassination in London’s Albert Hall in The Man Who Knew Too Much). 

Here the whirl of sound is lighthearted and luminous; it is followed by a gentle chorale-like motif in the brass. A high-voltage central episode brings back a sense of mid-century energy before the work comes full circle. Just like downtown Buffalo itself, which is dominated by the dignified architecture of solid buildings from the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s, I kept hearing echoes of that era in the music, as if Life Magazine were about to feature the International Control Dam at Niagara Falls on its cover in black and white. Hagen’s music sounds to me like something David Diamond would have composed if he were alive today, and City of Light suits its subject well.

—Steven Kruger, Fanfare Magazine

The concert began with the debut performance of Daron Hagen’s “City of Light,” commissioned to celebrate the BPO’s twin milestones. Described in the program as a “tone poem inspired by the thrum of electric energy and the thrill of illumination,” the work began with an elegiac theme featuring fluttering woodwinds and shimmering strings.

Each section of the Orchestra in the 16-minute piece had its moment; a snare drum with low brass provided counterpoint to the opening theme, and the use of dynamic pulse and key changes (modulations) at critical moments brought depth and complexity into a powerful, original work.

—Frank Housch, The Buffalo Hive