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The New Criterion
Michael Hersch at Merkin Hall
December 2011

Appreciated by many is Michael Hersch, the American composer. Anyone thirsting for estimable new music should. In the first half of the 2000s, he composed his massive piano work, The Vanishing Pavilions. He has now fashioned a less massive version of that work. The original takes two and a half hours to play, while the new version takes about an hour. In other words, the original version is a full evening (and then some), and the alternative version is half an evening, or two-thirds of one. Either way, The Vanishing Pavilions is a strange and wondrous thing: intense, as most Hersch pieces are. Also mysterious, ferocious, visionary, and original. As I was listening to the work in Merkin Hall recently, I began to hear some dogs not barking. There are no flourishes, no wasted notes. There is no showing off, no display. Just honest composition.

The pianist was Hersch himself, playing the hour-long version. He had taken the stage as he usually does, in a shy, almost embarrassed way. But what a pianist. I have said before that he writes as though his life depended on it, and the same could be said of his playing. He has a huge technique, to go with his formidable musical mind. He can make quick leaps across the keyboard without missing. He knows how to use the pedal, or pedals, allowing him to come up with all sorts of gradations and blurs. He can play fff without pounding. True, he beat the hell out of the keyboard at the end, making an immense white—but that was appropriate.

Obviously, he could have a piano career, or a combined piano-and-composing career, the way Thomas Adès does. But apparently he does not want it. His composition, I sense, is not to be distracted from. To my knowledge, no other pianist has played The Vanishing Pavilions, but I suspect some will, as the years and decades roll on. The hour-long version makes the work more programmable, not that Hersch has ever cared much about salability. At Merkin Hall, there was just a small audience, and I bet the composer knew virtually everyone in it. Nonetheless, I think we all had the sense that we were experiencing something of broad significance.

copyright 2011, The New Criterion

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