Nautilus Magazine Fall 2024 Issue
The Harrowing and the Beautiful
Composer Michael Hersch on grief, music, and reality
Q & A: Ah Young Hong and Michael Hersch Discuss Creative Synergy, Artistic Challenges, and the Beauty of Collaboration
Throughout his career, composer and pianist Michael Hersch has created a body of work that explores the intensity of terminal illness and the precarity of memory. Soprano Ah Young Hong has frequently collaborated with Hersch on these pieces, bringing a stylistic versatility informed by the late Renaissance and late-20th-century pieces by Milton Babbitt and Morton Feldman. Their early work together started with a critically acclaimed premiere of Hersch’s monodrama On the Threshold of Winter, in 2014, which left audiences stunned and Hong in tears.
" ... an extremely ambitious, difficult and necessary opera that forces humanity to confront the way it mythologizes the dynamics of power and justice ... it is also an opera which I believe has the genuine power to transform the outlooks of receptive audiences ... Poppaea reveals itself to be a mirror unto humanity and the mechanisms by which some of its darkness traits operate. It is, for this reason, an opera which I am very grateful to see in the contemporary repertoire ... a keen and crucial insight into the nature of rage itself."
"Past and present collide in Hersch’s devastating one-act opera ... he zeroes in without hesitation on very modern themes of trauma, resilience, and self-actualization. His longtime collaborator, the genius soprano Ah Young Hong, puts in her finest, most concentrated performance ... Support is too strong a word for the spellbinding work of Steve Davislim (Nero) and Silke Gäng (Octavia), Ensemble Solovoices, and Ensemble Phoenix Basel, conducted by Jürg Henneberger, who all surround Hong with commitment and complexity. Poppaea is a landmark piece and this is a recording to match it." - Jeremy Shatan
A production of Wien Modern, Theater ODEON, and ZeitRäume Basel - Biennale für neue Musik und Architektur.
photo by Susanna Drescher
"... an emotional power and effect that by no means every contemporary score can claim for itself ..."
"... it is the music that - with its subtle, ecstatic pressure - provides the most immediate effect. Hersch combines fragility and expressiveness"
"Disturbing, contemporary music theater of the kind like 'Poppaea' by Michael Hersch used to be a tradition at the Wiener Festwochen. It's good that Vienna is now adopting this genre in a modern way. Even better if it succeeds like the co-production with the ZeitRäume Basel festival at the Odeon. Hersch shows the mistress of the Roman emperor Nero as a Lady Macbeth ... overwhelming, opulent music that pairs perfectly with the verses of Fleischmann's libretto. The percussion, especially the gongs, are used menacingly, the strings shimmer as if electrified. The chorale-like passages in the female choir seem like startling injections."
photo by Delia Burri, Lukas Graf und Adrian Kelterborn – Prismago GmbH
"In this score, Michael Hersch dared to create an expansive as well as an agonising opulence ...The 18-member Ensemble Phoenix Basel sounded as if they were 80-strong ... Ever new individual colours peel out of the lush, crashing waves of the metrics of this score. The brass, sometime after Octavia's slow bleeding, the flute, and the caustically questioning bass clarinet, after the embers of the first piano glimmer from the core of Poppaea and Nero's marital hell ... Like Macbeth, Poppaea gets caught up in the whirlpool of inflicting violence until she herself becomes the victim. In a visionary juxtaposition, Octavia and Poppaea, whose destinies are so similar, prey on each other with a bizarre ambivalence of pity and rivalry."
"the risk was worth it ... the music of Michael Hersch, shocks and touches in equal measure."
"the script of storms will be premiered by the BBC Symphony Orchestra with soprano Ah Young Hong, conducted by Tito Muñoz. Hersch was deeply inspired by Hong since first hearing her in 2012, and he explains how it was as a result of this that most of the work he has written since 2012 has been for voice..."
"... It was an exceptional, long journey, this concert that began in the night and ended in the same. As the huge room darkened, a weary yet tender poignancy emerged, an effect that one might call spiritual. When leaving, the profanity of the city streets hit me hard."
"Hersch's music occupies itself with aspects of the darkest side of human experience ... a minutely textured and detailed landscape of desolation and introspective despair. The pieces traverse a wide expressive and technical territory, from whispering chords to oases of fragile, spectral beauty, to clustered screams from the abyss ... meticulously structured and minutely annotated"
A composer of “uncompromising brilliance” (The Washington Post), whose work has been further described by The New York Times as “viscerally gripping and emotionally transformative music ... claustrophobic and exhilarating at once, with moments of sublime beauty nestled inside thickets of dark virtuosity,” Michael Hersch is widely regarded as among today’s most gifted artists. Hersch's work "marries a volcanic New World energy to a deeply skeptical, often angst-ridden spiritual climate." (Andrew Clark, Financial Times).
"... Its sheer 15-hour length would have sufficed to dwarf all other concerts this year ... a maximal experience that was absolutely overwhelming."
"... Its sheer 15-hour length would have sufficed to dwarf all other concerts this year ... a maximal experience that was absolutely overwhelming."
"Agatha und der Krebs: Wie es kam, dass der US-amerikanische Komponist Michael Hersch für die Camerata Bern ein so düsteres Stück komponiert hat."
" ... he wrote the monodrama 'On the Threshold of Winter,' which rendered the terror and indignities of terminal illness so viscerally that at its premiere in Brooklyn in 2014, it left the audience shellshocked and the soloist, the soprano Ah Young Hong, in tears. Mr. Hersch is not the first composer to repeatedly deal with death. But he treats it not with sentimentality or exaggeration, but with uncompromising lucidity ... While there is great beauty in the chiaroscuro interplay between his expressionistic dissonances and Renaissance-style harmonies, his works never build toward resolution or transfiguration. A listener is unlikely to experience catharsis or find consolation. Ms. Kopatchinskaja likened Mr. Hersch’s music to a wound. Listening to it, she said, ‘you face this dark side, this shadow and blood. It’s so incredibly direct, it goes into your bones.’ That visceral impact can be uncanny, with powerful cluster chords spewing toxic resonance trails, and the occasional hopeful motif replicating like a faulty cell, its harmonic health uncertain."
July-August 2019 Issue 248
The Script of Storms
Reflections on Fawzi Karim
Works to include his Violin Concerto, Images from a Closed Ward, and the monodrama On the Threshold of Winter.
SEPT. 11'S MONUMENTAL DESPAIR, EVOKED BY SOLO PIANO
"Claustrophobic and exhilarating at once, with moments of sublime
beauty nestled inside thickets of dark virtuosity, 'Pavilions' is an
extraordinary musical experience and a pianistic masterpiece I would
unhesitatingly place alongside those of Bach and Liszt."
“... both players tested the limits of tonal range and virtuosity on their instruments, while exploring mostly the darker side of human experience.”
Michael Hersch's On the Threshold of Winter named one of Utah Review’s Top Ten Moments of 2018
Glimpse of a Suffering Soul
"Michael Hersch’s end stages, commissioned and given its New York premiere by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, was a little-relieved cry of anguish and anger in the face of terminal illness and death. But with a faint tolling of orchestral bells and whimpers in the violins at the end of the second movement, attitude gave way to what seemed a touching glimpse of the suffering soul itself."
Miranda Cuckson and Michael Hersch at National Sawdust
"Michael Hersch’s dense, dissonant, passionate music can seem stupefying when it shows up amid a program of more easily grasped fare. This September, however, National Sawdust dedicates a whole evening to this underappreciated composer, with performances by the fearless violinist Miranda Cuckson and a rare appearance by the composer himself … Listeners will have the total-immersion Hersch experience in works from the last decade and a half…”
Michael Hersch - Violin Concerto; End Stages
"With Images From A Closed Ward immediately establishing Hersch as a striking architect of darkness for string quartet, this album shows that he can think big as well. The Concerto is a gnarly and gripping piece, with a performance by violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and the International Contemporary Ensemble that will be hard to better. End Stages is featured in a live performance by the legendary Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and finds them delivering the eight short movements with authority, letting the emotionally probing writing shine. I have a feeling there will be more impressive work to come from Hersch."
"The music of Michael Hersch is direct, powerful, and expressive: it makes the pulsing nerve of the human condition audible, laying bare some of the most intense and powerful human emotions. Hersch's new album, Carrion-Miles to Pugatory, released May 31st on New Focus Recordings, documents three works—each composed for two musicians—that address what frequent collaborator Patricia Kopatchinskaja calls "this dark side, this shadow and blood.""
"the disc’s raw, gripping high point ... shockingly visceral music”
By Alex Ross, The New Yorker
"... violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, this year’s music director, had selected her programs long before December, but they spoke with eerie aptness to a town that had faced an apocalypse ... A world première by the Baltimore-based composer Michael Hersch harrowingly evoked the spread of cancer in a body ... Hersch’s new piece, a seventy-five-minute vocal cycle entitled “I Hope We Get a Chance to Visit Soon,” caused dissent in the legendarily open-minded Ojai audience: some were deeply moved, others repulsed. Its main text is drawn from e-mails that Hersch received from his friend Mary O’Reilly as she was dying of cancer. One soprano declaims these words while another sings settings of poems by Rebecca Elson, who tells of a similar struggle, in more oblique terms. The unvarnished intimacy of O’Reilly’s language—'I had a rather scary conversation with my oncologist'—made it difficult to find aesthetic distance, though this was perhaps the point: we were being shown the raw material for a work of art alongside its poetic elaboration. Hersch’s music is harsh, relentless, and often deliberately lacking in contrast, but it is gripping in its dogged progress. Skilled collaborators joined Kopatchinskaja’s quest. Ah Young Hong and Kiera Duffy were transfixing soloists in the Hersch ..."
"Hersch's "I hope we get a chance to visit soon" employs two sopranos (the Ojai premiere features Ah Young Hong and Kiera Duffy) and nine members of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra led by Tito Muñoz."
Violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and composer Michael Hersch discuss his Violin Concerto
“uncompromising brilliance"
Michael Hersch
end stages, Violin Concerto
Patricia Kopatchinskaja, violin,
International Contemporary Ensemble, Tito Muñoz, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
New Focus Recordings fcr208
"What we have here is almost an opera without words; there is the scenery of Weiss and the characters of the performers, but also the fixed motifs running through and appearing like cartouches on an ever changing rock face … Although much of the music is disturbing, even shocking (but never in the mere ‘shock-value ’ sense of the word) the overall effect of this huge but ultimately compact odyssey through the world stripped bare by Weiss ’ images, is one both moving and offering of solace … Despite these scenes of peril, after over 90 minutes between living and dying in Hersch and Weiss ’ world, a curiously cathartic sense is achieved; a sense of something endured yet survived, a procession of bleak images in sound that somehow resist despair. It is to be hoped that this moving work reaches more listeners. Zwischen Leben und Tod is a unique multi-layered creation and if milestones are needed in the violin and piano repertoire, then this surely is one.”
Black Untitled: The Music of Michael Hersch
Aaron Grad reflects on Michael Hersch’s works on the Ensemble Klang album Black Untitled (EKR09)
"His music is notable for its startling contrasts, with hauntingly beautiful interludes juxtaposed with dissonant outbursts and interwoven with solitary passages tinged with a Renaissance-flavored melancholy."
"Michael Hersch’s Violin Concerto immediately hurls us into a wrenching scene … There are brief passages of fragile lyricism and an occasional glimmer of bittersweet nostalgia, but little respite, as even these quickly evaporate or splinter into violent spasm. Patricia Kopatchinskaja, who commissioned the concerto, aptly describes it as ‘brutal and vulnerable at the same time’, and her performance conveys that dichotomy with ferocious commitment, aided with equal fearlessness by the International Contemporary Ensemble under Tito Muñoz. The music’s intense physicality and bleak atmosphere make for gripping, if harrowing, listening. What draws me to listen again and again is Hersch’s ability to communicate desperation that somehow never plummets into despair."
"A leading composer, noted for works of bleak despair, as well as a notable pianist in his own right, plays with our leading contemporary-music violinist, able to take on the most difficult of works with seeming ease. Their concert should be among the more special ones you will hear at the start of the new season. Selections from Mr. Hersch’s music include 'The Vanishing Pavilions,' 'In the Snowy Margins,' 'Fourteen Pieces' and 'One Day May Become Menace.'”
Review - Michael Hersch: Violin Concerto, end stages
Patricia Kopatchinskaja, International Contemporary Ensemble, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
"The dynamic violin virtuoso Patricia Kopatchinskaja—who served as the music director of the prestigious Ojai Music Festival in 2018—was riveted by a piece of music composed by Michael Hersch that she stumbled across online several years go. Attracted by the intense power of the work, she tracked down and commissioned him to write a Violin Concerto, which she plays here with trademark bravado, deftly supported by the International Contemporary Ensemble. The harrowing four-movement work took inspiration from a pair of poems by Thomas Hardy and a sculpture by Christopher Cairns, but it was written in response to the death of a friend, and there’s little doubt the music’s rigor and darkness were derived from that sense of loss. From the start, Kopatchinskaja relies on her technical brilliance, unleashing scratch tones and bruising intervals, but as the dissonance builds, her lines become more concentrated and tightly coiled. The piece slows, pitted by occasional rhythmic spasms, with the violin digging into a single pitch during the length of the third movement before fading into somnambulance, awash in weird harmonics. “End Stages,” commissioned and performed by Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, is no less brooding. Once again, the work was composed with death in mind, but inspired by a set of drawings by occasional collaborator Kevin Tuttle; the work moves toward acceptance of mortality with muted serenity."
"AMONG CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS ONE OF THE MOST URGENT AND COMPELLING VOICES IS MICHAEL HERSCH … I WANT TO LEND HERSCH MY FORCES BECAUSE HE FACES OUR PAIN WITH URGENCY, HONESTY AND DIGNITY. THAT’S WHY I PLAY HIS MUSIC.”
— PATRICIA KOPATCHINSKAJA
"Michael Hersch's Images from a Closed Ward is most assuredly uneasy listening, but not gratuitously so. By drawing inspiration from a series of unsparing etchings and lithographs the American artist Michael Mazur (1935-2009) created in the early ‘60s of inmates in a Rhode Island mental asylum, 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 ... 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 ... the world evoked by Images from a Closed Ward is bleak, but it's not wholly bereft of hope, no matter how grave the imagery. 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."
“13 pieces that do not let you go, played with utter conviction by the marvellous FLUX Quartet ... 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 ...”
"... an intensely human and moving examination of mortality–providing as much of an unblinking gaze into the abyss as Mahler’s Ninth Symphony and Schubert’s Sonata in B flat."
"... a work of great originality, daring, and disturbing power"
— The Baltimore Sun
"The two-act monodrama, which received its searing premiere on Wednesday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, is about illness and death ... Mr. Hersch’s music, for all its dark and fragile beauty, offers neither comfort nor catharsis. A traumatized silence clung to the Fishman Space auditorium after the last line sung by the soprano Ah Young Hong, the opera’s blazing, lone star: “Terrible is the passage/ Into the fold/ Both for man/ And /Animal.” ... Death casts a long shadow over the recent work of Mr. Hersch, who lost a close friend to cancer while battling the disease himself. But in “On the Threshold of Winter” Mr. Hersch has given himself the space to burrow past anger and incomprehension in search of an art fired by empathy and compassion."
— The New York Times
"... Hersch is so sincere in his darkness, and so sophisticated in his expressivity, that he can make the morbid magical."
— New York Magazine
"... On the Threshold of Winter is a journey into fatal illness that, in Hersch's hands, acknowledges no distance, safe or otherwise, between a listener and the suffering protagonist. ... Yes, it's that dark - as Hersch tends to be, but in ways that are purely existential and without moral corruption. There are no bad personas in Hersch's works, only innocents confronting an overwhelming world."
— The Philadelphia Inquirer
"Hersch, now in his second decade as one of the most prominent composers in the country, writes masterly modernist music of implacable seriousness. After personal tragedy - he not only battled cancer but watched a close friend die die of the disease - he came to write his first opera, a monodrama for soprano employing texts from the final collection of the Romanian poet Marin Sorescu."
— The New Yorker
November 21, 2016 | The Philadelphia Inquirer reviews Zwischen Leben und Tod [Between Life and Death] Hersch's 80' work for violin and piano after images of Peter Weiss
"In place of explicit narrative, the pieces conveyed the sensation of a profound internal experience for which words are inadequate."
January-February 2017 Issue 233
In an interview and profile in PN Review, writer Marius Kociejowski speaks with Michael Hersch about the relationship between his recent music and poetry.
"Several major works by this composer, whose dark, unsettling music is notable for its vivid contrasts, have been inspired by visual art. The 22 movements of his Zwischen Leben und Tod (Between Life and Death) for violin and piano each correspond to a painting or drawing by Peter Weiss, a 20th-century avant-garde German artist. The pianist Mark Wait and the violinist Carolyn Huebl will perform the work in a multimedia presentation."
— Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times
Fall/Winter 2015 Volume 2 Issue 2
"Pianist and composer Michael Hersch is on the Composition faculty at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University. His music has premiered in concert halls around the globe."
"a spare, intense, fiercely inward-turning work ... Hersch opened and continually returned to string sounds that were straight and jagged: long, wheezing harmonics in measured paces, like heartbeats or footfalls, tentative and dogged, marshaling their energies at times for violent and slashing blows of bow on string. It’s a piece that’s staking out a territory, each section like a building block, defining a space in conjunction with the other blocks around it, about the relationship between one micro-section and another ... a significant meditation on life and death ..."
Photo by Sam Oberter
June 20, 2014
By Vivien Schweitzer
The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra has commissioned Michael Hersch to write a concerto for the remarkable Patricia Kopatchinskaja to premiere during the autumn of the 2015/16 concert season.
"During the 2015/16 concert season members of Berlin's Atos Trio premiere Hersch's 35' work for violin and cello: Carrion-Miles to Purgatory: thirteen pieces after texts of Robert Lowell. In celebration of the Library’s storied history as a commissioner of new works the 2015-2016 season features the premieres of nine commissions including new works by Michael Hersch, Paul Lansky, Hannah Lash, Matthias Pintscher, Gabriela Lena Frank, Brian Ferneyhough, Maria Schneider, Frederic Rzewski, and a new dance work choreographed by Pontus Lidberg performed by the Martha Graham Dance Company."
Network For New Music Premieres Hersch’s “A Breath Upwards” in Philadelphia The Network for New Music commissioned this new song cycle after texts of Dante Alighieri and Ezra Pound for their 30th anniversary season. Writing of the premiere, the Philadelphia Inquirer noted, "... composer Michael Hersch usually leaves you gasping - cognitively speaking - to keep up ... But in his new song cycle, a breath upwards, Hersch stopped me in my tracks as he explored a narrower-than-usual range of sound, harmony and gesture, requiring a more minute exploration of the tension between music and texts from Dante's Inferno and related ones by Ezra Pound. This piece went inward with fine gradations of awe, disbelief and contemplation of the incomprehensible."
"The pianist Jacob Rhodebeck will perform the New York premiere of Michael Hersch’s mammoth 'Vanishing Pavilions' ... the first complete performance of the work since Mr. Hersch debuted it in 2006. Inspired by texts by the British poet Christopher Middleton, the dramatic, unsettling and emotionally potent 'Pavilions' offers an expansive insight into Mr. Hersch’s dark-hued aesthetic."
Reviewing in the Nashville Scene, John Pitcher writes: "In person, the American composer Michael Hersch usually comes across as a gentle soul, an unassuming, soft-spoken, painfully shy man. So people are often surprised when they first hear his daring, ferociously aggressive music. Imagine a tabby cat with a Siberian Tiger’s roar, and you get the idea ... Zwischen Leben und Tod is the second Hersch masterpiece premiered at Vanderbilt in recent years ..."
By Tim Smith
"The intellectual brilliance involved is startling enough; the
addition of expressive intensity can be almost overwhelming ... The
most extraordinary and moving passage was the final song, when the
dark mood lifted just enough, leading to a long, beautiful melodic arc
for the singer in the final line: 'And then we emerged to see the
stars again.' The sudden cut-off at the end of that line -- like the
way a falling star evaporates in an instant -- was a master stroke."
"... composer Michael Hersch usually leaves you gasping - cognitively speaking - to keep up ... But in his new song cycle, a breath upwards, Hersch stopped me in my tracks as he explored a narrower-than-usual range of sound, harmony and gesture, requiring a more minute exploration of the tension between music and texts from Dante's Inferno and related ones by Ezra Pound. This piece went inward with fine gradations of awe, disbelief and contemplation of the incomprehensible."
"Powerful Contrasts, Volcanic Engergy - The American composer and
pianist Michael Hersch, recipient of the American Composers Award and
the Rome Prize among others, presented his massive piano cycle 'The
Vanishing Pavilions' in Bucharest, Romania. The work is inspired by
poems of British poet Christopher Middleton. Hersch's personal style
is characterized by powerful contrasts: sometimes fortissimo passages
flash with the energy of volcanic eruptions only to be drowned in
their own resonance, or he juxtaposes them with lyric sound islands.
His insanely difficult ten-part piano concerto of 2010 gave the New
York based Romanian pianist Matei Varga the opportunity to deliver a
brilliant, highly emotional and virtuosic performance which for forty
minutes fascinated those in attendance. Varga played the concerto’s
European premiere as soloist with the Filharmonica Banatul Timisoara
under the direction of Radu Popa."
— Neue Musikzeitung
"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 ..."
"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."
Violinist Miranda Cuckson speaks about her interest in new music, her artistic collaboration with composer Michael Hersch.
On the Life of a Twenty-First Century Composer: Michael Hersch
Spring 2011
By Susan Forscher Weiss
February 17, 2011 - The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers highly acclaimed Audio Portraits series gives listeners unique insight into the creative process, as told by the writers themselves.
Michael Hersch: Five Fragments for unaccompanied violin
Peter Sheppard-Skaerved, violin
Galleria Marco - Mexico City
