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  • Michael Hersch
    “works that are often startling in their complexity, beauty and demonic fury”
    The New York Times
    Featured Projects
  • “masterly modernist music of implacable seriousness”
    The New Yorker
    Featured Projects
  • “devastating emotional impact”
    The Philadelphia Inquirer
    About Michael Hersch
  • “astounding facility at the keyboard”
    International Piano
    Watch + Listen

Poppaea

Hersch's long anticipated opera to be presented in a joint production with Wien Modern and ZeitRäume Basel – Biennial for New Music and Architecture in 2021.

Ah Young Hong, Poppaea
Steve Davislim, Nero
Silke Gäng, Octavia
Ensemble SoloVoices
Ensemble Phoenix Basel
Jürg Henneberger, Conductor
Stephanie Fleischmann, librettist
Markus Bothe, Stage Director
Piertzovanis Töws Architekten, Stage Design
Eva Butzkies, Costumes
Marius Kob, Puppets

[ photo by Piertzovanis Toews, Basel ]

Nominee for the 2023 Austrian Music Theater Prize
for Best Contemporary Music Theater

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MEDEA

For soprano, 6-part vocal ensemble, and sixteen players
Commissioned by Ensemble Musikfabrik and Kunststiftung NRW.
World Premiere on June 3, 2023 with Sarah Maria Sun, Schola Heidelberg and Ensemble Musikfabrik
Cologne, Germany
[ artwork "Medea" by Kevin Tuttle. ]

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Agatha

Performed by Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Ah Young Hong, Reto Bieri, and the Camerata Bern with video by James Matthew Daniel.
Featuring Jennifer Florentino in choreography by Katie Spelman.

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Images From a Closed Ward

"Hersch’s inspiration was a set of etchings and prints artist Michael Mazur created of people institutionalized in a mental asylum in Rhode Island in the 1960s. The music is accordingly disturbing ... a world unmoored and unstable, haunted by an emptiness and fundamental self-alienation. One can only imagine what those people experienced or how their surroundings impinged on them; Hersch’s composition provides sixty-five minutes of empathetic conjecture, which the FLUX Quartet realizes with a relentless power."

Avant Music News, 3.2018

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sew me into a shroud of leaves

Michael Hersch’s 10-hour, three-part cycle “sew me into a shroud of leaves” was composed over a fifteen year period, 2001-2016, and presented for the first time in its complete form at the 2019 Wien Modern Festival.

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I hope we get a chance to visit soon

Recorded live at the 2018 Aldeburgh Festival and released by arrangement with BBC Music, New Focus Recordings releases Michael Hersch's I hope we get a chance to visit soon. The work, a companion piece to his 2012 monodrama On the Threshold of Winter, revisits several themes Hersch has engaged with often over the past decade, terminal illness and loss.

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