Michael Hersch Recordings
A composer of “uncompromising brilliance” (The Washington Post) whose work has been 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,” Michael Hersch is widely considered among the most gifted composers of his generation. Composer Georg Friedrich Haas has written that Hersch “is the explorer of an unconditional, radical expressivity that reveals the human abyss without any palliation.” Recent events and premieres include his Violin Concerto with Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Ensemble intercontemporain, and at the Lucerne Forward Festival; productions of his two-act monodrama, On the Threshold of Winter in New York, Chicago, Salt Lake City, and Washington D.C., and his elegy I hope we get a chance to visit soon at the Ojai and Aldeburgh Festivals. Other premieres include his three-part chamber cycle, sew me into a shroud of leaves, a work which occupied the composer for fifteen years, at the 2019 Wien Modern Festival and New York City’s National Sawdust in 2023. In 2021, the composer’s opera, Poppaea, premiered in Vienna and Basel in a co-production of the ZeitRäume Basel and Wien Modern Festivals. During the 2019/20 season, Mr. Hersch was the Composer-in-Residence with the Camerata Bern, and in early 2020, his new work Agatha had its premiere performances in Bern and Geneva. The same year his work for soprano and orchestra, the script of storms, premiered with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. In a later recording, Opera News wrote of the work that Hersch’s ability “to probe the substructures of human suffering is unmatched … and his singular vision … makes it difficult to turn away.”
In 2023, Hersch wrote a new theater work, MEDEA, for Sarah Maria Sun, Schola Heidelberg and Ensemble Musikfabrik, and his song cycle, one step to the next, worlds ending received its U.S. premiere with Ah Young Hong and the Talea Ensemble. Hersch’s newest opera, and we, each, after texts by Shane McCrae, was premiered in Baltimore, Washington D.C., and New York. Michael Hersch came to international attention at age twenty-five, when he was awarded First Prize in the Concordia American Composers Awards. The award resulted in a performance of his Elegy, conducted by Marin Alsop in New York’s Alice Tully Hall. Later that year he became one of the youngest recipients ever of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Composition. Mr. Hersch has also been the recipient of the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship and Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and the President’s Frontier Award from the Johns Hopkins University.
