Premieres of new and newly restored song cycles of John Harbison. His intensely moving Milosz Songs paired with a new set based on poems of Michael Fried that squarely confront death,

Sarah Brailey, soprano | Clara Osowski, mezzo soprano | Tomasz Lis, piano

Program includes

Harbison: Milosz Songs (2006; 2024) / texts by Czeslaw Milosz (US PREMIERE of the newly restored complete edition)

Harbison’s intensely moving cycle, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for Dawn Upshaw, on poems of poet laureat Czeslaw Milosz, whose words drew Harbison not just for their content, but also for their essential musical qualities. The lyrics are fragmentary; the melodies are elusive; and everyday images have dissonant elements. Harbison’s lucid and precisely wrought music complements Milosz's gripping words…in audible textures and essentially tonal harmonic language. “A significant new work,” wrote the The New York Times.

The piano version of Milosz Songs originally included only six of the eleven poems; the new version restores the cycle to completion. Polish pianists Tomasz Lis brings to this reading a sensitivity only possible through his nationalistic afflitiation.

Harbison: The Next Subject (2024) / texts by Michael Fried (WORLD PREMIERE)

Bach’s cantatas are, in the main, about death. After a lifetime living in the world of Bach cantatas—studying, conducting, performing—this setting of six of Michael Fried’s poems is Harbison’s own “Bach cantata,” a form that increasingly absorbs him.

Harbison: Songs After Sappho (2025) / texts by Sappho-Carman (WORLD PREMIERE)

“In my practice, texts will arrive, unsought, at the right moment. The  essential ‘opening of the curtain’ occurs when a lived experience links up insistently with a writer’s words, which then seem ready, even destined for a new role.”  —John Harbison

The Artists

Sarah Brailey, soprano

Bio coming soon

Tomasz Lis, piano

Bio coming soon

Clara Osowski, mezzo

Bio coming soon

John Harbison’s song settings

Whether with orchestra, chamber group, or with piano, Harbison’s songs have attracted expansive praise from many of our best music commentators, writing to his deep engagement across a vast array of texts:

John Harbison has been bringing radiant and illuminating music to the written word with powerful and unforgettable results for his entire career.   

— Lloyd Schwartz

Harbison's music is astonishingly responsive to each word and image in the text, often with very literal text-painting, but it also catches the whole, sometimes even before the singer has sung a word.  The “accompaniment”– whether piano or chamber group or orchestra – is  equal partner with the singer and poet, often introducing or commenting on the emotional content of the text. 

— David St. George

No composer today has a finer ear for the nuances of poetry nor quicker responsiveness to the ambiguities of poetic argument than Harbison.  

— David St. George

Not every composer is good at this. Not every composer loves poetry. But John Harbison is; and does. For more than [fifty] years, he’s been an inspired setter of great poetic texts— poems often exploring the shadowy ambiguities and uncertainties of emotional, spiritual, ethical, and even political questions, and the very nature and function of art itself.

— Lloyd Schwartz

For Harbison, music with words has been an abiding concern…His choice of texts, from ancient and modern, and the intensity of his settings, often speak eloquently to social, ecological, and interpersonal concerns. 

— David St. George

John Harbison has always been astutely attuned to language; he was recognized for poetry as well as for music at Harvard, and his compositional output—along with symphonies, concertos, and a wide variety of solo and chamber works—has vocal music at its core.    

 —  Robert Kirzinger