Nina Berman - Babbitt: Works for Treble Voice & Piano (2022)

Soprano Nina Berman and pianist Steve Beck release a recording of Milton Babbitt's complete works for treble voice and piano, including his epic A Solo Requiem for soprano and two pianos with Eric Huebner. Babbitt was deeply engaged with poetry throughout his life, and his text settings demonstrate his sensitivity to the intricate nuances of the musicality embedded in the poems. Berman and Beck's performances are beautifully expressive, illuminating the longer lined lyricism that is revealed through precise renderings of Babbitt's often thorny, virtuosic scores.

Milton Babbitt (1916–2011) is well known for his contributions to serialism and electronic music. A less heralded but perhaps no less remarkable aspect of his legacy is his deep engagement with poetry. His personal library had dozens of books on poetic analysis, literary criticism, linguistics, and related disciplines. Reflecting this interest, vocal music is a prominent part of his output, appearing in every decade of his creative life. On this album, Nina Berman and Steven Beck present a complete survey of his work for high voice and piano, spanning 1950 to 2002.

The result is a celebration of Babbitt’s marvelous text-setting. He is particularly attuned to poetry’s intrinsic musicality: its rhythms, accent patterns, lineation, syntax, and rhyme. Babbitt’s music is an exemplar of high-modernist angularity, but his vocal writing almost always retains a lithe, nimble lyricism, and his close study of poetry ensures that his texts are communicated clearly. The few moments that push lyrical vocality beyond its natural limits do so with clear expressive intent, as expressions of pain, horror, or disorientation.

“The Widow’s Lament in Springtime” (1950) is the first song Babbitt published. Written as a memorial for Roy Dickinson Welch, Babbitt’s colleague at Princeton, the song sets a heartbreaking poem by William Carlos Williams in which an elderly widow contrasts her grief with the vibrant, colorful flowers of spring.

Du (1951) is a cycle of seven songs drawn from a collection by August Stramm, an early-twentieth-century German Expressionist. It was written just a few months after “Widow’s Lament,” but its expressive impact is a world apart. Stramm depicts two characters known only by their pronouns, Ich (I) and Du (you). The situation is one of unrequited love by Ich for Du, but Stramm’s poetic vision stretches beyond the two characters: in Ich’s mad ravings, love is transformed into an eternal cosmic grappling.

Stramm’s poetry is remarkable for its high density of phonemic echo, pushing sense to its limit: “Wirr / Wirren / Wirrer / Immer wirrer / Durch / Die Wirrnes / Du / Dich / Ich!” In “Sounds and Words” (1960) and “Phonemena” (note the spelling!), Babbitt takes the obvious next step. The “text” in these songs is constructed of pure phonemes. “Sounds and Words” is notable for its free-floating rhythmic flexibility, each short section unfolding at a different rate. “Phonemena”—performed here in both its versions, one accompanied by piano (1969) and one by tape (1975)—is quick atonal scat singing. A joyful romp.

A Solo Requiem (1977) sees Babbitt return to a more somber mood. He composed the Requiem as a memorial for Godfrey Winham, a young student of Babbitt’s and the husband of soprano Bethany Beardslee, who premiered the work. In settings of Shakespeare, George Meredith, Gerard Manley Hopkins, August Stramm, and John Dryden, this vast cycle amounts, in Joseph Dubiel’s words, to a search for a “tenable attitude toward death.” The accompaniment is unusually full, requiring two pianos that trade spectral diminished seventh chords in a complex, skittering exchange. The work requires the full range of vocal expressivity: shy pleading in the opening sonnet, quiet meditation in the Meredith, overpowering intensity in the Hopkins and Stramm, and half-ironic oration in the Sprechstimme setting of Dryden. The cycle ends by reprising crucial phrases from each of the settings, closing in hopeless resignation: “Farewell.”

Babbitt’s late vocal works are shorter and lighter: whimsical, nostalgic, sometimes humorous, and often featuring knowing winks at older music. “In His Own Words” (1988) is a birthday tribute to the composer Mel Powell. Babbitt compiled the spoken text from Powell’s writings and lectures about Webern, Hindemith, electronic music, Stravinsky, Babbitt himself, and Powell’s own career.

In “Pantun” (2000), Babbitt returns to John Hollander, setting six of Hollander’s translations of Malay pantun. A pantun is a quatrain form in which each couplet expresses distinct ideas that, after a moment’s thought, reflect a deeper connection.

A wistful sense of loss also suffuses the album’s last song, “Now Evening after Evening” (2002). This setting of an eclogue by Derek Walcott depicts a seaside sunset, with gentle waves rolling in from a calm Atlantic. For most of the work, the voice rises and falls in slow, quiet arcs. A greater emotional pitch in the second half complicates the flow, as the singer recalls “your voice”—perhaps the voice of a lost lover. The song fades out with luminous, bell-like repeated tones, a soft farewell to Babbitt’s final work for voice and piano.

– Zachary Bernstein (edited for length, complete notes in booklet)