The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra named Richard Danielpour its composer-of-the-year for this season, but the American composer feels he works with the PSO every year.

"It is the sound I hear in my head when I write for orchestra," he says. "They are the prototypical orchestra in my mind. I have written for so many orchestras around the country, but I have never seen so many virtuoso players play so well together as in Pittsburgh. They shine individually and collectively, which is rare. If I were going to sample an orchestra, that would be it. I can't say why, but that this has happened."

It might sound as if Danielpour grew up in town, but he didn't. He was born in New York City in 1956. He got to know the PSO when it commissioned him to write his Concerto for Orchestra for the orchestra's 100th anniversary. That work, subtitled "Zoroastrian Riddles," was recorded in 1996 and premiered live in 1997. The association made a lasting impact on the Grammy Award-winning composer, who is known for large scores in a traditional and expressive language.

"Danielpour is a composer who exhibits a strong gift for melodic content," says Leonard Slatkin, PSO principal guest conductor and renowned interpreter of American music. "He is a composer who is not interested in pushing the envelope but making sure that the content in the envelope is substantial."

"When I write for soloists I have had to absorb the sound that these great artists make, and it is not so different from that with this orchestra," says Danielpour. The PSO will perform four of his works this season, starting with the premiere of "A Woman's Life" (Friday and Saturday); "Zoroastrian Riddles, Part I" (Nov. 13 and 15); "Pastime" (Feb. 19 and 21, 2010); and "Rocking the Cradle" (April 29-May 1).

Yet even with his love of the PSO's play, the best performance Danielpour has heard in recent years was in the townhouse of Maya Angelou in New York. He had worked with the esteemed poet in the mid 1990s for a piece called "Portraits" and wanted to engage her again for a new song cycle he was to write for singer Angela Brown, which would become "A Woman's Life."

"It had been a while since I met her and I had been married and I wanted my wife to meet her," says Danielpour. But when he asked Angelou if she would be interested in writing poems on the trajectory of a woman's life, "she said, 'I already have -- they are all hidden in my collected poems!' "

Danielpour talks about what happens next with hushed reverence: "She put the collected works on a little bookstand that she had brought into her dining room and read them. It was one of the most amazing performances I have ever seen. Then she said, 'How's that for a cycle?' "

He eventually decided to set seven of the poems: "Little Girl Speakings," "Life Doesn't Frighten Me," "They Went Home," "Come. And Be My Baby," "Let's Majeste," "My Life Has Turned to Blue" and "Many and More."

Woven together, the poems outline "the cycle of a woman's life from childhood to the golden years," says the composer. "This is not Maya Angelou's life. The image I get of the person who is speaking is an ordinary woman through whom extraordinary things occur, and who grows through the stages of her life. They are snapshot images of her life but imbued with a quality that speaks for all women."

"He writes very well for the voice," says Slatkin. "You hear elements of Copland, Bernstein and Barber. The texts lead him -- sometimes jazzy sometimes prayer-like and meditative -- but in general it is a simple treatment of the text, very descriptive."

"There are some pieces we composers write that are hard work from beginning to end, but some that are like writing a wave -- this was like that, a labor of love."

And for a sound he loves.

Critics Andrew Druckenbrod and Scott Mervis talk about music on "The Beat," available exclusively at PG+, a members-only web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.