Michael Hersch: Images From a Closed Ward

Reviews

"Like the series of lithographs and etchings by Michael Mazur that inspired it, this 13-movement string quartet by Michael Hersch is dark and unsettling. And like those black-and-white images of inmates of a mental hospital in the 1960s, Mr. Hersch’s music is beautiful in a timeless, eternal-night sort of way. The fine Blair Quartet brings intensity and suspense to the dense harmonies that move by turns with creeping dread and desperate urgency." — The New York Times

"Commissioned by the Blair String Quartet, who throw themselves into the recording as if not only their life but the composer's as well depended on the relentless intensity of every bar, Michael Hersch's 'Images From a Closed Ward' demonstrates the extreme musical and emotional lengths to which a composer and a string quartet will go these days to maintain a serious relationship. Hersch's grim graphic quartet responding to Michael Mazur's etchings and lithographs of inmates in a Rhode Island psychiatric hospital during the early 1960s lives a separate though equally haunted life from its visual inspiration. It tells no narrative story, only disquieting human agony. Although the music's searing pain and endless despair, desperately trying to escape mortality - which erupts most violently in the 10-minute 11th movement - never really subside, a radiant core seems to emerge in the third of the music's 13 untitled movements. This core leads gradually over time to the possibilities of peace through release and consolation ..." — Gramophone Magazine

"... It is the sound of a string quartet playing with rage and inconsolable sadness." — ArtNowNashville

"... aurally stunning ... Hersch utilizes a refreshing, bracing, and innovative admixture of dissonance and consonance ... Hersch’s music is not “easy listening.” Indeed, it is difficult listening, difficult in the sense that one cannot listen to this work as background music if one’s desire is to tune in to what the composer is attempting to communicate. It is, I assure you, worth the effort for those whose ears are acclimated to the music of our time, and find rewards in music that does not yield all of its secrets in a single audition ... The Blair String Quartet plays with commendable intonation and flair, and produces an amazing array of colors ... Highly recommended for the adventurous." — Fanfare Magazine

"This is important music ... it is hard to imagine adding anything more around it. It is dissonant, but not abstract by any means. It makes me want to get those people out of there and communicate with them. People need to open their minds to the world. The Blair Quartet plays with conviction and offers such solace as they can. That goes for the music as well. This is sad stuff, but Hersch tries to make it an open door to the rest of life."
— American Record Guide

"...the journey left you in a figurative blindfold taken off momentarily to glimpse another previously unimaginable terrain." — The Philadelphia Inquirer

"... not a note is wasted. Every note or phrase has its purpose. One of his (Hersch’s) markings is 'haunted, stricken.' If anyone knows the trick of expressing agony in music, he does. And his command of craft, overall, is something rare. Often at his premieres, we say, 'We have heard something important. We have heard music that will last,' I felt just this way about Images from a Closed Ward." — City Arts

"Hersch's inspiration was a set of etchings and prints artist Michael Mazur created of people institutionalized in a mental asylum in Rhode Island in the 1960s. The music is accordingly disturbing—jarring, discordant, harsh and unyielding. Hersch leverages blocks of sound, deliberately out-of-tune harmonies and extended string techniques to convey a world unmoored and unstable, haunted by an emptiness and fundamental self-alienation. One can only imagine what those people experienced or how their surroundings impinged on them; Hersch’s composition provides sixty-five minutes of empathetic conjecture, which the FLUX Quartet realizes with a relentless power." — Avant Music News Full Article

"Michael Hersch's Images from a Closed Ward is most assuredly uneasy listening, but not gratuitously so ... Hersch's sixty-five-minute string quartet is true to its disturbing subject matter. Performed by the New York-based FLUX Quartet, the work is harrowing yet also infused with humanity. Never is the impression left that Mazur and Hersch are indulging in some perverse ironic exercise or exploiting their subjects for amusement's sake; instead, one comes away from the project convinced that both felt great compassion for human beings living in such dire circumstances and wished to honour them using their respective art forms ... Hersch's sombre work is structured (and indexed) as thirteen movements yet plays without interruption, the shift from one to the next often signified by dramatic changes in volume, dynamics, and mood ... Sonorities are often raw, especially when the sounds generated by the four appear as a homophonic mass, and the playing, even during its quieter episodes, inculcates feelings of dread and claustrophobia. accompaniment for the brittle, dirge-like expressions of the others. Tension builds almost unbearably during quiet movements when one anticipates the merciless rupture to come ... We feel for their isolated and anonymous subjects, recognizing that each at one time enjoyed—or at least so we hope—a happier and more fulfilling existence, a life perhaps not all that much different from our own." — textura Full Article

"Hersch seems drawn to dark subject-matter, especially in the extended chamber works of his recent output ... The Images are the disturbing etchings in the 'Closed Ward' series from the 1960s by Michael Mazur, depicting patients in an insane asylum. These despairing, faceless figures, contorted and slumped into subhuman positions like living figures drawn from Hieronymus Bosch or Francis Bacon, evoke thirteen brief movements ranging from the desperately sad to the utterly desolate, with one episode of manic fury. The movements contrast in style, texture, degree of dissonance and depth of despair ... Among the abrasive harmonies moments of lucidity occur ...The booklet reproduces a number of Mazur's pictures, matched with historical photographs, the briefest perusal of which shows the aptness of Hersch's interpretation of this gloomy, harrowing subject-matter."
— Records International Full Article

"Finally a tribute to an American composer and an American ensemble: Michael Hersch (*1971) combines the wide literary culture of Holliger and the uncompromising force of Ustwolskaja. My first encounter with him was Images from a Closed Ward – 13 pieces that do not let you go, played with utter conviction by the marvellous FLUX Quartet ... I recently recorded Hersch’s violin concerto with the amazing ICE Ensemble in New York and I feel that his music is very necessary: It is he who formulates the anxiety and pain that we all feel, when we hear of dying seas, disappearing species, expanding droughts and rising fascism ..." — Patricia Kopatchinskaja, The Violin Channel Full Article