‘To say that Daron Hagen is a remarkable musician,’ wrote Ned Rorem in Opera News, ‘is to underrate him. Daron is music.’ Each of Hagen’s piano trios has a particular significance. The first, Trio Concertante, won Columbia University’s Bearns Prize for Chamber Music; the second, J’entends, was inspired by Nadia Boulanger’s final words ‘J’entends une musique san commencement et sans fin’ (‘I hear a music without beginning or end’), as well as by a Degas painting and Beethoven’s Great Fugue; the third, Wayfaring Stranger, recalls the memory of Hagen’s brother and the folk melody he so loved; and the fourth, Angel Band, pays tribute to the prodigious violinist Joyce Ritchie Strosahl.