Laurie Altman: Briefly: Songs & Poems
Navona Records

Much like his daring opus Briefly, New York City-born composer Laurie Altman (b. 1944) has interests straddling multiple realms. A one-time composition student at Mannes College of Music and recipient of numerous awards and fellowships (including a University Professors Citation of Excellence from Tufts University in Boston), he's been for many years a Resident Composer at Westminster Choir College/Rider University in Princeton, New Jersey. Altman's also, however, performed as a jazz pianist with his quintet at venues in New York City, Russia, Helsinki, and Germany. In a life already marked by adventure, he moved to Switzerland in 2010 and has creatively flourished in that setting too.

His appetite for adventure is reflected in Briefly, which fuses spirited song performances and spoken word poetry into a work of unusual character and provocative design. Composed for the most part by Altman (the exceptions being re-imaginings of “Smile,” “Somewhere Over the Rainbow," and “Autumn Leaves”) and recorded during May 2025 in Belmund, Switzerland, the work couples Altman, who recites poems and plays piano, with mezzo-soprano Isabel Pfefferkorn, pianist Clipper Erickson, and, on the closing track, electric guitarist Alexander Gil. The poems are all Altman's except for two featuring texts by poet David Herrstrom and “In Another Time,” set to a poem by Pablo Neruda.

In simplest terms, the work oscillates between spoken word episodes and song treatments based on the poems, with Altman delivering inspired readings of the texts and Pfefferkorn and Erickson presenting theatrical art-song treatments of same. As anticipated, elements of jazz, classical, and spoken work performance merge into an unpredictable yet never less than engaging amalgam. With talents as powerful as Pfefferkorn and Erickson involved, the project commands one's attention throughout, even if it's slightly longer than it needs to be.

Altman's spoken word readings are always ‘musical,' his recitations repeatedly distinguished by rhythmic inflections and rich emphases (as an example consider his impassioned “her essence Whitmanesque, ‘her body electric'” utterance in “She Is My Home”). A broad range of topics is explored in the poems, from thoughtful imaginings of words spoken by the citizens of Kyiv to reflections arising in response to a performance of La Boheme and musings inspired by Miles Davis's “Blue in Green” (it's fascinating to hear Pfefferkorn's artful rendering of the latter's impressionistic text after Altman's own spoken word version). Some texts are intensely personal, others his imaginings of another's experience (e.g., a fifteen-year-old Ukranian boy who loses his leg in an explosion). Whereas a recitation by Altman is typically followed by a same-titled musical treatment by Pfefferkorn and Erickson ("Diva's Prelude,” “Loss II,” “Snow”), the sequence is reversed for "What Is A Leg?” and “She Is My Home.”

June 2026