Upcoming Projects DOCUMENTARY FILM "THE SUDDEN PIANIST" NAMED AN OFFICIAL SELECTION OF THE AMERICAN DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL WORLD PREMIERE RECORDING OF CAELUM DEDECORATUM FOR UNACCOMPANIED DOUBLE BASS IN LATE 2012 NEW OPERA TO BE PREMIERED NEW WORK FOR ENSEMBLE KLANG 2012-2013 Concert Season August 13, 2012 Bargemusic Concert Series August 23, 2012 Salon Christophori September 4, 2012 at 8PM Merkin Concert Hall SEPTEMBER 7, 2012 AT 7PM Spectrum Concerts September 13, 2012 at 3PM International Beethoven Project Festival September 18, 2012 at 8PM Sylvia Adalman Recital Series September 25, 2012 Release Date of bassist Jeffrey Weisner's November 19, 2012 L’Espirit du Piano Festival February 26, 2013 at 8PM Thomas Hampson/Wolfram Rieger |
Recent News
Shai Wosner Premieres Michael Hersch's Piano Concerto No. 2,
along the ravines, with the Seattle Symphony below bright multitudes there was only earth IMAGES FROM A CLOSED WARD "Nearly every new work by Philadelphian Michael Hersch is like a journey to the center of the Earth, each achieved by a different route and in varying vehicles. Thursday at Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall, the composer's medium was string quartet, and the journey itself often left you in a figurative blindfold taken off momentarily to glimpse another previously unimaginable terrain ... Much of the piece uses the string quartet medium to create sonorities that might be paradoxically described as vividly pale, against which there are dabs of more bold colors or short themes, vaguely pointing in several possible directions that are left unpursued. Rarely is there a completed thought: All movements end inconclusively, often with several seconds of designated silence that freezes the musical idea in suspended animation. Often, Hersch uses a series of chords, seemingly similar for being voiced with extremes of treble and bass, but with subtle differences creating forward motion and even narrative. Other times, two alternating chords suggest a musical trudge into the unknown, or maybe in circles. When Hersch adds a few extra chords to that, the piece seems to walk on all fours. Emphatic, fortissimo dissonance suggests unsolvable crisis. One movement tosses and turns, like an ill person trying to find a position without pain. Bleak? Oh yes. This isn't at all what W.B. Yeats had in mind when coining the term "terrible beauty," but it fits." "An audience in Weill Recital Hall had a reminder of the extraordinary talent of Michael Hersch. He is an American composer born in 1971. He has written a new string quartet on commission from the music school at Vanderbilt University. Called Images from a Closed Ward, the piece takes some inspiration from art by the late Michael Mazur. His etchings and lithographs looked into hellish existence. Hersch’s string quartet is in 13 (brief) movements. As usual with him, the materials are spare, and not a note is wasted. Every note or phrase has its purpose. The first movement seems to me a bleak trudge. The second one is sharp and ferocious. The third is almost a song. A later movement is wrenching in its despair. In the end, it’s as though a clock runs out, leaving nothing but nothing—a void ... One of his markings is “haunted; stricken.” If anyone knows the trick of expressing agony in music, he does. And his command of craft, overall, is something rare. Often at his premieres, we say, “We have heard something important. We have heard music that will last.” I felt just this way about Images from a Closed Ward." “... an expansive 45-minute work of searing energy and emotion ... Few composers have been as successful at tapping into our most primal emotions ... With 'Images from a Closed Ward,' Hersch has arguably come as close as any human to capturing, in sound, the feeling of unreachable isolation. It is the sound of a string quartet playing with rage and inconsolable sadness.” NIGHT PIECES "a highly effective new concerto for trumpet by Michael Hersch, full of visual allure, touring all sorts of dark places rarely visited by the instrument. Hersch, a professor at Baltimore's Peabody Institute, didn't have visual scenery in mind when he composed "Night Pieces" in 2009. Rather, he thought of a late, dear friend and a melancholy poem by Yeats. Yet what he produced is still 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."
The Cleveland Plain Dealer The New Criterion
The Baltimore Sun Blog
Interview With Violinist Miranda Cuckson
The Hopkins Review – Spring 2011 ASCAP Audio Portrait Peter Sheppard-Skaerved plays Michael Hersch SYMPHONY NO. 3 (WORLD PREMIERE) "Hersch seems to have carved his Symphony No 3 with granitic force. He has cast it in two large movements, surrounding five brief interludes; the dense harmonies, forbidding instrumental detail and sensation of inexorability seem not to have fazed the 83-member festival orchestra. The strings brood, the brass rages and, once in a while, you encounter a consonance with the sweetness of honey. Hersch provides a few moments of relief. Before he plunges into the tumultuous finale, he offers a short episode of broken phrases, and the silences between them leave you breathless." "Hersch's Symphony No. 3, presented after intermission, evoked a considerably darker atmosphere. ... the score introduces a chilly, often harrowing palette, with brooding strings, glowering brass and anguished cries from the woodwinds deployed in formidable blocks of sound. The effect is both mechanized and deeply human ... Hersch impresses with sheer sonic weight and intensity. Alsop, a longtime advocate of the composer — this is his fourth visit to Cabrillo — lavished considerable care on the score's world premiere." "In its world premiere, Michael Hersch's Symphony No. 3 delved deeply into dark psychic territory with painfully raw dissonances and near-human instrumental cries. Fleeting moments of calm beauty surfaced momentarily amid the storms. Two of the work's seven movements glittered with flitting woodwind ripples, and the finale, with a weighty fugue-like expansion, provided a welcome level of repose." "This was not a sweet sadness. Nearly unbearable, it spoke to the kind of injury from which one does not heal. A deep hurt which we hold tight to ourselves, a hurt that names us. A sudden bang on untuned drum ... The orchestra gathered to a slow thickness, a tension of dread, with shimmer and slick of violins. Trumpets cascaded sharply down, silvered threads among low strings. ... a march across life’s rhythms." Recording Reviews
Sounds Heard: Michael Hersch—Sonatas Nos. 1 & 2 for Unaccompanied Cello |
News
Program Notes by Jason Eckardt
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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