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Profiles

Composer Michael Hersch on music as memorial, and his premiere at the Ojai festival

Los Angeles Times, June 6, 2018
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Cancer Haunts a Composer’s Life and Work

The New York Times, June 3, 2018
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Interview and profile in PN Review
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.
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Music for Music's Sake

The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 17, 2016
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A Survivor, Inspired by Love and Loss

The New York Times, June 20, 2014
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Psychodrama im Konzertsaal

ThunerTagblatt, February 19, 2020
Agatha und der Krebs: Wie es kam, dass der US-amerikanische Komponist Michael Hersch für die Camerata Bern ein so düsteres Stück komponiert hat. [Agatha and Cancer: How American composer Michael Hersch came to compose such a dark work for the Camerata Bern.]
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A Composer Ready to Paint the Town Red

The New York Times, January 7, 2001
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  • dramatic, unsettling and emotionally potent
    The New York Times
  • masterly modernist music of implacable seriousness.
    The New Yorker
  • one of the most seriously engaging musical voices in the U.S. today … a volcanic New World energy to a deeply skeptical, often angst-ridden spiritual climate
    The Financial Times
  • so sincere in his darkness, and so sophisticated in his expressivity, that he can make the morbid magical
    New York Magazine
  • The intellectual brilliance involved is startling enough; the addition of expressive intensity can be almost overwhelming
    The Baltimore Sun
  • a natural musical genius who continues to surpass himself ... an unrelenting and unforgettable intensity.
    The Washington Post
  • music of extraordinary precision and daunting technical difficulty
    Nashville Scene
  • ... a unique voice in American music: he doesn’t follow any formula, just his own potent instincts.
    Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Reviews

Geliebte gegen Gattin, oder: Der Fluch der Niedertracht

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

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Ein Festival-Höhepunkt

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

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Poppaea bei Wien Modern als Blut-Rausch

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

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Between Hersch and Weiss: Sound and Image

"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."

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A Private Vastness

“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.”

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New York Music Daily - The 50 Best Albums of 2018

“The most harrowing recording of the year …”

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Nova Chamber Series’ On the Threshold of Winter

“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…”

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Desolation Row: Soprano, Dal Niente give searing advocacy to Hersch’s operatic meditation on death

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…”

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The New York Times reviews the Hersch Festival at Spectrum

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."

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Miranda Cuckson champions Michael Hersch at Spectrum

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

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European Premiere of Hersch Violin Concerto Given at Avanti Summer Sounds Festival in Finland

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The New York Times Recommends The NYC Premiere of Hersch’s “Zwischen Leben Und Tod” at National Sawdust

"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."

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Review: A Dark, Haunting Work by Michael Hersch Gets a Premiere

"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."

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“Carrion-Miles To Purgatory: Thirteen Pieces After Texts Of Robert Lowell” Premieres at The Library of Congress

"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 ..."

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An unsettling monodrama, a tour de force performance at Peabody

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

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The Baltimore Sun Reviews Hersch’s New Song Cycle “A Breath Upwards”

"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."

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Review: Huebl and Wait Premiere Composer Michael Hersch’s Zwischen Leben und Tod

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 ..."

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Inner Musings on a Precarious Descent

“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.”

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Recording Review: Michael Hersch: Sonatas Nos. 1 & 2 for Unaccompanied Cello

"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."

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Review of the premiere of Last Autumn

“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 …”

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Review of the premiere of The Vanishing Pavilions

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

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Hersch Works at the Enescu International Festival

"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."

Gramophone Reviews: Hersch’s “Images From A Closed Ward”

"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 ..."

Hersch’s “Images From A Closed Ward” Reviewed in The New York Times

"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."

 

Press Quotes

"The intellectual brilliance involved is startling enough; the addition of expressive intensity can be almost overwhelming" The Baltimore Sun

"dramatic, unsettling and emotionally potent"
The New York Times

"masterly modernist music of implacable seriousness."The New Yorker

"... a masterpiece" cotidianul.ro

"Each idea unfolds in the length of time it needs to make its point. Let your attention wander for a second, and you've missed something. Concentrate, think, be patient, and the rewards for listening are everywhere." —The Philadelphia Inquirer

"one of the most seriously engaging musical voices in the U.S. today … a volcanic New World energy to a deeply skeptical, often angst-ridden spiritual climate." —The Financial Times

"astounding facility at the keyboard" —International Piano

"a unique voice in American music: he doesn’t follow any formula, just his own potent instincts." —Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"works that are often startling in their complexity, beauty and demonic fury." —The New York Times

"music that can take the tiniest of gestures and within seconds wreak havoc on one's emotional state. The brief Fourteen Pieces for unaccompanied violin on texts of Primo Levi take on images of dread - "dense violent dreams," one line reads ... The sixth movement beginning "I won't go far," sounds like a tentative but graceful reaching -- a trapeze artist with no net stretching an arm out." The Newark Star-Ledger

"music of extraordinary precision and daunting technical difficulty." Nashville Scene

"powerfully evocative, a gripping journey through somber emotional states. Bursting into the foreground with violent screams, the orchestra repeatedly interrupted haunting, lyrical exchanges between the soloist and colorful partners such as harp, bass clarinet and English horn ... touring all sorts of dark places rarely visited by the instrument." The Cleveland Plain-Dealer

"[a] boldly designed work ... True to his refreshing penchant for the outer boundaries of expression, Hersch frequently sets the upper end of the dynamic gamut in vivid contrast with some equally extreme quiet passages ... by no means easy listening, but I find it profoundly rewarding and no end fascinating." Musicweb International

"a painfully personal work.  It s difficult to imagine a more fitting musical setting for broaching the subject of impending death ... The overall effect is stark and desolate yet beautiful. The paradox between the actual suffering and the beauty of the poetry is deeply unsettling, as it s meant to be." —Opera News

"an intensely focused seven-movement score in which bursts of dissonant chordal figuration are offset by tense, foreboding silences ... he writes with an almost painterly variety." The New York Times

"Hersch is a startling talent. He writes music that contains great complexity, but is remarkably lucid ... The dense harmonic blocks and mazes of percussive assaults seem to speak from a world of trouble, fear and doubt. But shards of light penetrate the music in ways that prove just as powerful. The superb orchestration ensures that each tormented peak and each moment of reflection registers clearly." The Baltimore Sun

"a natural musical genius who continues to surpass himself ... an unrelenting and unforgettable intensity." The Washington Post

"Finally in this debut disc, the world outside of a few cities is able to be immersed in the unsettling yet pristine realm of composer Michael Hersch ... vast expanses of muted splendor and large-scale developments ... Hersch's ability to sustain intensity over quiet and deliberate themes is remarkable." The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"a haiku-like series of economic gestures with devastating emotional impact." —The Philadelphia Inquirer

"His Recordatio in memory of Luciano Berio, displays the combination of ascetic rigor and freedom of expression characteristic of all his music. The actual melodic material is almost negligible: short clusters made of very few notes, like rapid ornamental gruppettos, superimposed over bands of sound, single notes or intervals sustained with the pedal. ... an occasional whirlpool of ascending atonal arpeggios; distinct treatment of the keyboard's registers, each with its own separate phrasing and articulation — yet these limited materials suffice to build a whole world." —andante.com

"The cello by itself has hardly ever resounded so brilliantly as in Hersch's Sonata No. 2 for Solo Cello... arresting ideas and sonic miracles piled in one upon another for nearly 50 minutes in this, the closing work of the concert. Once again, one was impressed by a huge musical intellect who isn't, at least for now, aiming for the hit parade." —Fort Worth Star-Telegram

"Hersch demonstrates an impressive control of dissonance and a keen textural awareness of sound. His writing swings between the hazy and the precise, between a dark, tone-clustered opacity that hits in the gut, and a crystalline transparency that draws the ear toward the smallest details: a pair of falling intervals on the piano, a muted jab in the basses. The piece ends with a series of blurry chords held in the lower strings. These final notes are present but mysteriously distant, like the memory of sound corrupted by the distance of time." —The Washington Post

"... extraordinarily communicative music ... Mr. Hersch's music speaks for itself eloquently"The New York Times

"a stunning virtuosity that dropped one’s jaw" Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

" a prodigy of immense proportions" —Marin Alsop in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"If the symmetries and proportions of Mr. Hersch's music evoke the grounded fixity of architecture, its dynamism and spontaneous evolution are those of the natural world. Its somber eloquence sings of truths that are personal yet not confessional ... within the sober palette, the expressive power and range are vast." The New York Times

 

Interviews

Patricia Kopatchinskaja on the music of Michael Hersch (c/o The Ojai Music Festival)
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'Winter' is a deeply personal debut opera for Peabody's Michael Hersch
JHU Hub Magazine, June 30, 2014
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BBC RADIO 3 PRESENTS:
MODERN MUSES 19: Michael Hersch and Patricia Kopatchinskaja

Violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and composer Michael Hersch discuss his Violin Concerto
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Interview With Violinist Miranda Cuckson
Violinist Miranda Cuckson speaks about her interest in new music, her artistic collaboration with composer Michael Hersch.
Watch