A.Y. Hong, Duffy; Musicians of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Muñoz. English text, German text, with translation. New Focus Recordings FCR251

I HOPE WE GET A CHANCE TO VISIT SOON  by composer Michael Hersch is a painfully personal work.  It’s difficult to imagine a more fitting musical setting for broaching the subject of impending death, particularly when it involves a close friend’s fight against terminal cancer. The sixteen-movement set seems like a song cycle, but the profundity of the narrative hints that it’s really a chamber opera at heart.

Written as a companion to his 2012 monodrama On the Threshold of Winter, which tackles similar subject matter, I hope we get a chance to visit soon opens with a setting of poetry by Christopher Middleton (in both English and German). For the remainder of the work, Hersch uses emails sent to him by his late friend Mary Harris O’Reilly during her treatment and hospitalizations for ovarian cancer, juxtaposed and spliced with poetry by Rebecca Elson, who also died of cancer.

O’Reilly’s words are matter-of-fact, as if by sticking to the strict reality of her worsening prognosis and bypassing the communication of her innermost feelings, she might better survive her illness. “I noticed a firm area in my abdomen and made a doctor's appointment to get it checked out. They were pretty confident that it was a benign cyst of some sort,” she says at the outset. Conversely, Elson’s emotionally devastating poetry excavates her despair and futility  with an unwavering gaze toward the deleterious effects of the disease:

“They are terrifying, these mushrooms, the way they push up overnight,
… and you know they are feeding off decay, that death is just below the surface.”

Though Elson's language doesn’t often deal with the minute details of her experience, the accuracy of her assessment of cancer and how it feels—both physically and psychologically—simultaneously contrasts and resonates with O’Reilly’s account.

Hersch’s liberal use of dissonance makes for prickly listening. But he also leaves room for legato phrasing and poignant silences. 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. The orchestral textures move mercurially between searing chromatic chords and elongated notes that act as drones, signifying both stillness and dread. Strings and woodwinds take turns at this visceral-subtle dynamic. These characteristics encapsulate Elson’s surrealism and apocalyptic imagery, as well as O’Reilly’s obfuscated anxiety and fear.

I hope we get a chance to visit soon was recorded by the BBC at the 2018 Aldeburgh Music Festival, and the intensity of the live performance shines through. Conductor Tito Muñoz’s direction of personnel from the Mahler Chamber Orchestra is razor-sharp, while also being sensitive to Hersch’s hyper-specific articulations of mood.

Soprano Ah Young Hong voices O’Reilly’s emails with dramatic severity, communicating her underlying doubts and apprehensions with fearful declamatory speech. In sung passages, Hong’s voice is appropriately crystalline, almost shrill, as if to underscore the fragility of O'Reilly's situation. As the voice of Elson, soprano Kiera Duffy employs vibrato more consistently, in a way that reinforces the quiet trauma without succumbing to melodrama. Hersch reserves the more lyrical vocal writing for Duffy, who imbues her role with musical grace.