Judith Berkson
Ms. Berkson has an imperious talent, but she’s a calm, curious performer, devising brave ways to accompany herself. – Ben Ratliff, The New York Times
Mezzo-soprano, pianist and composer Judith Berkson, based in Los Angeles, studied voice with Lucy Shelton and composition with Joe Maneri at the New England Conservatory. She received her MA in composition from Wesleyan University and a Doctorate in performance and composition from California Institute of the Arts. As well as being a singer of experimental music, she is also rooted in traditions. A former cantor and teacher of liturgical music at Old Westbury Hebrew Congregation in New York, she counts cantorial music and Hebrew liturgy amongst her earliest inspirations. After singing and playing in jazz and experimental bands and rock groups, including several of her own ensembles, Judith Berkson refocused her energies in solo performance, looking anew at the possibilities for [...]
Ms. Berkson has an imperious talent, but she’s a calm, curious performer, devising brave ways to accompany herself. – Ben Ratliff, The New York Times
Mezzo-soprano, pianist and composer Judith Berkson, based in Los Angeles, studied voice with Lucy Shelton and composition with Joe Maneri at the New England Conservatory. She received her MA in composition from Wesleyan University and a Doctorate in performance and composition from California Institute of the Arts. As well as being a singer of experimental music, she is also rooted in traditions. A former cantor and teacher of liturgical music at Old Westbury Hebrew Congregation in New York, she counts cantorial music and Hebrew liturgy amongst her earliest inspirations. After singing and playing in jazz and experimental bands and rock groups, including several of her own ensembles, Judith Berkson refocused her energies in solo performance, looking anew at the possibilities for voice with piano accompaniment for her ECM debut Oylam (2010).
Judith: “I’ve been trying to redefine, for myself, what that might mean, exploring new ways in which voice and piano can be combined and performed by one person, working on all the different possibilities of rhythm, melody, harmony, texture and so on. As I did this I was also asking myself some key questions: what is my style? What am I trying to express in music? What do I want to emphasize? I practised very rigorously, wrote new music only for voice and piano, and came out of this period feeling stronger and more self-confident than I had previously. I also discovered that there were ways to integrate aspects of all the music that is important to me in the solo work.”
Oylam presents a striking and widely cast idiomatic programme comprised of standards, Schubert Lieder, Jewish cantorial music and her own original conceptions, performed solo on voice, piano, keyboard and organ. “More remarkable than the range of genres is Ms. Berkson’s mastery of them and her ability to weave them into a seamless program. … Oylam reveals the connections between seemingly divergent paths. The unifier is her pensive, spare performance style.” (The Wall Street Journal)
On Thee They Thy, released in 2026, Berkson brings her idiosyncratic voice and vast music traditions spanning experience into a trio context with bassist Trevor Dunn and Gerald Cleaver on drums. “I view the pieces on this recording as a natural extension of my solo work,” says Judith Berkson. “This idea of songs that are quite intimate and personal, informed by jazz with pockets of improvisation but also drawing from song traditions, and avant-garde traditions in their harmonic and melodic material, embracing elements of minimalism and even conceptual art.” Her co-conspirators share with Berkson an aversion to limiting their creativity to a single musical idiom. On the album, she leads them through a swiftly changing programme with original songs, vocal experimentation, total improvisation, a new setting for prayer and more…
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