Michael Hersch

Biography

Michael Nathaniel Hersch (born June 25, 1971) is an American composer and pianist. He currently serves as faculty at the Johns Hopkins Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, Maryland, where he completed his own studies in music composition. The New York Times has commented that he writes "extraordinarily communicative music" and that "Mr. Hersch's music speaks for itself eloquently".

Early life and musical education

Born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Reston, Virginia, Hersch was introduced to classical music at the age of 18 by his younger brother Jamie, who showed him a videotape of Georg Solti conducting Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.
He began his studies at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore with Morris Cotel. In 1995 Hersch studied at the Moscow Conservatory, where he worked with Albert Leman and Roman Ledenev. That same year he also worked with John Corigliano, John Harbison, and George Rochberg at a program for young composers. Hersch then returned to Peabody for graduate studies, graduating in 1997 with a Master of Arts. He returned to Peabody in 2006, where he currently teaches composition. Until 2019, he was the chair of the composition department.

Early recognition

His first success came when Marin Alsop selected Hersch's Elegy as winner of the American Composers Prize, and conducted it at Lincoln Center in New York in 1997. That year also saw Hersch awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Music Composition. He has also been a fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center, where he studied under Christopher Rouse, the Norfolk Festival for Contemporary Music, and the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan. In 2000, Hersch was awarded the Rome Prize, in 2001 the Berlin Prize. While in Europe Hersch worked with Hans Werner Henze and Luciano Berio. Other honors include the Charles Ives Scholarship (1996) and the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship (2006) from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.
Hersch's earliest recordings appeared on the Vanguard Classics label, the first released in 2003, with performances by the composer and the String Soloists of the Berlin Philharmonic. This was followed by two other Vanguard discs. The second, with Hersch performing his own work in addition to music of Morton Feldman, Wolfgang Rihm, and Josquin des Prez, was selected by The Washington Post and Newsday as among the notable recordings of 2004-05. In 2007, Hersch's multi-hour piano cycle, The Vanishing Pavilions (2005), with the composer at the keyboard was released. David Patrick Stearns of The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote on the October 14, 2006 premiere of the work given by the composer.

Music

Described by The New York Times as "viscerally gripping and emotionally transformative music … claustrophobic and exhilarating at once, with moments of sublime beauty nestled inside thickets of dark virtuosity", Hersch's work "marries a volcanic New World energy to a deeply skeptical, often angst-ridden spiritual climate." (Andrew Clark, Financial Times)
In 2014, Hersch's first work for the stage, On the Threshold of Winter (2012), premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Fishman Space by the NUNC ensemble (Miranda Cuckson, director) with Ah Young Hong as the soloist. The opera, about terminal illness, is a reaction to the passing of one of Hersch's closest friends in 2009, as well as the composer's own diagnosis of cancer several years earlier. Its text comes from the deathbed poems of Romanian writer Marin Sorescu.
Hersch has written a number of pieces premiered by Hong, including his one-act opera POPPEA (2019) created alongside librettist Stephanie Fleischmann, which premiered in at the Festival ZeitRäume Basel and the Wien Modern Festival in 2021. The opera is a continuation of the story of the Roman Empress Poppea, picking up where Claudio Monteverdi's L'incornazione di Poppea ended.
In recent years, a frequent collaborator has been violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja. The violinist has commissioned several works from Hersch, including his Violin Concerto, which she premiered with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra in 2015. It was recently announced that he will be writing a new work for her in 2018-19 to be premiered with Camerata Bern.
Other collaborations include those with Dutch contemporary music group Ensemble Klang, violinist Miranda Cuckson, and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.
Hersch's more recent music has been characterized as increasingly "spare, intense, fiercely inward-turning."

Piano performance

A highly regarded pianist, Hersch has performed throughout the U.S. and internationally. Though he appears in public infrequently, he commands a wide repertoire from Josquin to Boulez. Since 2000, he has primarily focused on performances of his own music.

Audio recording

the wreckage of flowers - Works for Violin

Label: Vanguard Classics (MC-105)
Miranda Cuckson, violin; Blair McMillen, piano
Release Date: 2010
includes Five Fragments, Fourteen Pieces after texts of Primo Levi, and the wreckage of flowers: 21 pieces after poetry and prose of Czeslaw Milosz
Sonatas Nos. 1 & 2 for Unaccompanied Cello

Label: Vanguard Classics (MCS-CD-104)
Daniel Gaisford, cello
Release Date: 2009
Review: by Vivien Schweitzer in The New York Times
The Vanishing Pavilions

Label: Vanguard Classics / Musical Concepts (MC-101) [2-CD Box Set]
Michael Hersch, piano
Release Date: 2007
Review: by Steve Hicken in sequenza21
Chamber Music

Label: Vanguard Classics (ATM-CD-1240)
String Soloists of the Berlin Philharmonic; Michael Hersch, piano
Release Date: 2003
Review: by Andrew Druckenbrod in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Hersch – Josquin – Rihm – Feldman

Label: Vanguard Classics (ATM-CD-1558)
Michael Hersch, piano; Daniel Gaisford, cello
Release Date: 2004
Review: by Tim Page in The Washington Post

Orchestral Works

Label: Naxos 8.559281
Marin Alsop/Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra
Release Date: 2006
Review: by Andrew Clark in Financial Times