In The Poet Sings, composer John Harbison (artistic co-director of Token Creek Chamber Music) engages in profound musical conversation with some of the most distinctive poetic voices of the past and present. Harbison’s new song cycles, presented here in their first performances, reflect his enduring fascination with the rhythm, texture, and emotional resonance of language.
Spanning ancient lyric (Sappho), modernist abstraction (Wallace Stevens), and the introspective clarity of contemporary poets such as Louise Glück, Michael Fried, and Czesław Miłosz, the program traces an arc through different poetic sensibilities. Harbison’s settings reveal the musical possibilities embedded in the spoken word—drawing out both its innate structure and its expressive ambiguity in his characteristically vivid word painting.
Whether illuminating the spare elegance of Glück, the philosophical complexity of Stevens, or the timeless intensity of Sappho, Harbison’s music invites listeners into a world where poetry is not merely set, but sung into being.
These new cycles exemplify the vitality of the modern art song: intimate, reflective, and richly attuned to the interplay between voice and verse.
World premieres of new and newly restored song cycles of John Harbison.
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)
Harbison: [A Clear Day and No Memories (2025) / texts by Wallace Stevens (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