Event Information
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Thu09Oct2025
Harbison: Milosz Songs
7:30pmSarah Brailey, soprano
Clara Osowski, mezzo
Tomasz Lis, piano
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
Token Creek Festival Barn
4037 Hwy. 19, Village of DeForest, Wisconsin