Orson Rehearsed

Daron Hagen, born in 1961, is an American composer, writer, performer, and filmmaker. He has received commissions from the Seattle Opera: Amelia (2010); the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, the National Symphony, the Buffalo Philharmonic, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and the Curtis Institute of Music among numerous others. After publishing a dozen operas, reams of chamber and orchestral music, and over 400 art songs and cycles, Hagen has begun to explore a nascent genre: composer-auteur operafilm—his first two, the internationally-laureled Orson Rehearsed (2021) and 9/10: Love Before the Fall (2022), are self-directed and edited projects based on his own libretti/shooting scripts and scores. He has also stage directed new productions of his operas nationwide, and published a critically-acclaimed memoir, Duet with the Past (McFarland, 2019).

An avid collaborator, in addition to having composed concertos for Gary Graffman, Jaime Laredo, Sharon Robinson, and Jeffrey Khaner, operatic roles and cycles for Jane Eaglen, Nathan Gunn, Kate Lindsey, Susanne Mentzer, Robert Orth, Ashley Putnam, Paul Sperry, and Robert White, he has worked with directors Stephen Wadsworth, and Ken Cazan; and conductors Leonard Bernstein, Mei-Ann Chen, Michael Christie, JoAnn Falletta, Lukas Foss, David Alan Miller, Michael Morgan, Kenneth Schermerhorn, Gerard Schwartz, and Leonard Slatkin, among others.

A Lifetime Member of the Corporation of Yaddo and past president of the Lotte Lehmann Foundation, he has served as a faculty member and artist-in-residence at dozens of major universities, festivals, and cultural institutions across the US and abroad, including Bard College, Baylor University, the Chicago College of Performing Arts, the CUNY Graduate Center, the Curtis Institute, Miami University, NYU, the Princeton Atelier, and UNLV. A Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Camargo Fellow, he studied at Curtis and Juilliard. His work has received, along with the ASCAP-Nissim, Barlow Endowment, Columbia University Bearns, and Kennedy Center Friedheim prizes, grants from the Copland and Mellon Funds, Virgil Thomson Foundation, NEA, Opera America, and others, as well as the Charles Ives Prize (1983) and an Academy Award (2014) from the American Academy of Arts and Letters “for the artist who has achieved his personal voice.”

Over 50 recordings of his works (he has served as conductor and collaborative pianist on several) have been released on Sony Classical, Naxos, Bridge, CRI/New World, and Albany, among others. His music is published by Peermusic Classical. He lives in Rhinebeck, New York with his wife, composer, vocalist, and educator Gilda Lyons, and their two sons.