Discography
Michael Hersch: Sonatas Nos. 1 & 2 for Unaccompanied Cello 
Michael Hersch: Complete Works for Solo String Instruments - Volume I
Sonatas Nos. 1 & 2 for Unaccompanied Cello
Label: Vanguard Classics (MCS-CD-104)
Daniel Gaisford, cello
Release Date: 2009
This disc is the first in an ambitious three-part series surveying Michael Hersch's complete solo works for strings. The current recording focuses on the demanding early sonatas for unaccompanied cello, both of which were written while the composer was still in his twenties. The second installment, to be released in 2010, will feature his music for violin, performed by violinist Miranda Cuckson. The final installment, scheduled for a 2011 release, will comprise unaccompanied works for double bass and viola.
Michael Hersch - The Vanishing Pavilions
Label: Vanguard Classics / Musical Concepts (MC-101)
[2 CD Box Set]
Michael Hersch, piano
Release Date: 2007
"The evening felt downright historic. [Hersch] conjured volcanic gestures from the piano with astonishing virtuosity. Everything unfolds in open-ended, haiku-like eruptions, though built on ideas that recur throughout the 50 movements, from a lamenting, chantlike melody to passages of such speed and density you'd think the complete works of Franz Liszt were played simultaneously within three minutes. Overtly or covertly, The Vanishing Pavilions is about the destruction of shelter (both in fact and in concept) and life amid the absence of any certainty. And though the music is as deeply troubled as can be, its restless directness also commands listeners not to be paralyzed by existential futility."
-- The Philadelphia Inquirer (from the premiere performance)
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Michael Hersch: Chamber Music
Label: Vanguard Classics (ATM-CD-1240)
String Soloists of the Berlin Philharmonic
Michael Hersch, piano
Release Date: 2003
"... austere and uncompromising. What attracts the ear, and keeps it engaged, is Hersch’s acute ear for harmony. This manifests itself not only in the colours of the sounds themselves – but also in the way that glimmers of tonality emerge at key locations in a largely atonal landscape. But, then, Hersch clearly has an innate dramatic sensibility. His Octet is spread over 11 distinctly characterised movements (and at 31 minutes the largest work here), yet how inexorably it moves. The climax is placed in the 10th movement (and, interestingly, the dramatic shape of this movement appears to be a condensation of the work’s larger structure), while the final movement (a reprise of the second) serves as an anguished, angry and strangely familiar sounding epitaph. The effect is devastating.” -- Gramophone Magazine
“With Hersch, you hear a sincere, emotionally raw voice with every utterance – often a harrowing experience. ... urgent, commanding, able to communicate without shouting and without cliche.” -- Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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Hersch – Josquin – Rihm – Feldman
Label: Vanguard Classics (ATM-CD-1558)
Michael Hersch, piano / Daniel Gaisford, cello
Release Date: 2004
"... a natural musical genius who continues to surpass himself." -- Tim Page (The Washington Post)
"He plays his own spare transcriptions of works by 15th century master Josquin des Prés, as well as Morton Feldman’s chilly “Piano Piece (for Philip Guston)”, the moody silences and sometimes gauzy, sometimes jangly textures of which he articulates with imposing power. In Wolfgang Rihm’s “Auf einem anderen Blatt”, Hersch’s palette ranges from diaphanous, petal-soft tones to startlingly metallic stabs. Of greatest interest are Hersch’s “Milosz Fragments”, inspired by the Nobel laureate’s poems and based on the composer’s 2003 work, the wreckage of flowers, and his Sonata No. 2 for Unaccompanied Cello. Daniel Gaisford brings the latter to life with astonishing virtuosity and a haunted lyricism ideally suited to Hersch’s somber muse. “Milosz Fragments” finds Hersch at his most tortured, traversing landscapes of uncompromising bleakness. An immensely rewarding disc.”
-- Time Out NY
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- Label: Naxos 8.559281
Conductor: Marin Alsop
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra
Release Date: 2006
"These performances confirm Michael Hersch (b.1971) as one of the most seriously engaging musical voices in the U.S. today. The Second Symphony marries a volcanic New World energy to a deeply skeptical, often angst-ridden spiritual climate. Alsop and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra are brilliant advocates." -- Andrew Clark (The Financial Times, UK)
"(4 stars) Three years separate Michael Hersch's First and Second Symphonies. The first, composed in 1998, is hauntingly beautiful, densely textured with an inexorable sense of the organic. The second displays a rather more searching and adventurous style, where dramatic extremes and a more intense astringency are its lifeblood. There's an alluring boldness about this young American's music, which is noticeable too in Fracta and Arraché, both contained in this big-scale survey by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Marin Alsop." -- The Scotsman
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