"... an emotional power and effect that by no means every contemporary score can claim for itself"

"... the first major highlight of the Wien Modern Festival"

“Hersch clothes this tableau of the deranged in a surprisingly emotionally charged score.”

"The composer Michael Hersch wrote his Zwischen Leben und Tod as a cycle to the paintings of Weiss, not I think as mere description of images but as a way of exploring the musical realisations of, as Hersch himself puts it, ‘color and motion, of proportion’. This suggests a deeper engagement with image than might be the case with a programmatic approach. This isn’t to imply that the music is dispassionate, quite the contrary, more that it seeks to plunge to an essence – how sound and image interact, one might almost say on the level of the vibrational spectrum. Yet, thoroughly engaged is sound to picture, viscerally so."

“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.”

“The most harrowing recording of the year …”

“Hersch ’s opera puts performers and audience members in a closed space of remarkable imagery and music that commands us to consider, remember and meditate on the experiences and inevitability of our mortality…”

“On the Threshold of Winter is not for the faint of heart, and is a tough work to experience. But for all its hard edges and stark perspective, it is ultimately an intensely human and moving examination of mortality…”

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."

"In place of explicit narrative, the pieces conveyed the sensation of a profound internal experience for which words are inadequate."

"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."

"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."

"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 ..."

“…a work of great originality, daring, and disturbing power.”

"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."

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 ..."

“The two-act monodrama, which received its searing premiere on Wednesday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, is about illness and death ... 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 … 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.”

"Michael Hersch's Sonata No. 1 for unaccompanied cello is one of his earliest published works, written when he was 23, in 1994. The riveting piece, given a gripping performance by Daniel Gaisford, is included on the first of three discs featuring Mr. Hersch ’s solo and chamber music for string instruments, being released by Vanguard Classics."

“Written in two parts that last three hours, Last Autumn has 41 exclamatory movements, many of them haiku-like, creating a composite portrait of something too huge and undefinable, glorious and terrible, to be seen in anything more than glimpses …”

“… the piece represented a summation of the great but disturbing symphonic and chamber works he has written during the last 10 years.”

"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."

"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."