Discography
Michael Hersch - The Vanishing Pavilions 
Vanguard Classics / Musical Concepts
(MC-124)
(2007)
Michael Hersch, piano
"The evening felt downright historic. [Hersch] conjured volcanic gestures from the piano with astonishing virtuosity. Everything unfolds in open-ended, haiku-like eruptions, though built on ideas that recur throughout the 50 movements, from a lamenting, chantlike melody to passages of such speed and density you'd think the complete works of Franz Liszt were played simultaneously within three minutes. Overtly or covertly, The Vanishing Pavilions is about the destruction of shelter (both in fact and in concept) and life amid the absence of any certainty. And though the music is as deeply troubled as can be, its restless directness also commands listeners not to be paralyzed by existential futility."
-- The Philadelphia Inquirer (from the premiere performance)
"... he has composed one of the most unusual pieces in
memory: The Vanishing Pavilions for piano, a work in
two "books," as Hersch describes them, and taking
about two hours and twenty minutes to play. Apart from
his composing, Hersch is a brilliant pianist, and
there could be no better advocate of his own music.
... the work is barely fathomable: reflecting terror,
agony, wonder. I hesitate to describe it. It seems
both intensely personal and universal. It is
ferocious, desperate, manic; titanic, daunting,
world-containing; visionary, apocalyptic, inexorable.
You sometimes want to look away from it; it can be
terrible to contemplate. And yet you still heed it.
You sense that the piece is both reacting to this
world and striving for something beyond. I intend to
live with The Vanishing Pavilions for a while longer.
It has gotten under my skin, as it must; it has even
disturbed my sleep. A first hearing takes a
considerable amount of time, especially given the
lives so many of us now lead. But one hearing is
plainly insufficient. Michael Hersch has something to
say, and he bears listening to."
-- National Review (2007)
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- Conductor: Marin Alsop
Orchestra: Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra
Audio CD: November 21, 2006
Label: Naxos 8.559281
"These performances confirm Michael Hersch (b.1971) as one of the most seriously engaging musical voices in the U.S. today. The Second Symphony marries a volcanic New World energy to a deeply skeptical, often angst-ridden spiritual climate. Alsop and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra are brilliant advocates." -- Andrew Clark (The Financial Times, UK)
"(4 stars) Three years separate Michael Hersch's First and Second Symphonies. The first, composed in 1998, is hauntingly beautiful, densely textured with an inexorable sense of the organic. The second displays a rather more searching and adventurous style, where dramatic extremes and a more intense astringency are its lifeblood. There's an alluring boldness about this young American's music, which is noticeable too in Fracta and Arraché, both contained in this big-scale survey by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Marin Alsop." -- The Scotsman
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Hersch – Josquin – Rihm – Feldman
Performer: Michael Hersch, piano / Daniel Gaisford, cello
Audio CD: September 21, 2004
Label: Vanguard Classics (ATM-CD-1558)
... a natural musical genius who continues to surpass himself. -- Tim Page (The Washington Post)
He plays his own spare transcriptions of works by 15th century master Josquin des Prés, as well as Morton Feldman’s chilly “Piano Piece (for Philip Guston)”, the moody silences and sometimes gauzy, sometimes jangly textures of which he articulates with imposing power. In Wolfgang Rihm’s “Auf einem anderen Blatt”, Hersch’s palette ranges from diaphanous, petal-soft tones to startlingly metallic stabs. Of greatest interest are Hersch’s “Milosz Fragments”, inspired by the Nobel laureate’s poems and based on the composer’s 2003 work, the wreckage of flowers, and his Sonata No. 2 for Unaccompanied Cello. Daniel Gaisford brings the latter to life with astonishing virtuosity and a haunted lyricism ideally suited to Hersch’s somber muse. “Milosz Fragments” finds Hersch at his most tortured, traversing landscapes of uncompromising bleakness. An immensely rewarding disc.”
-- Time Out NY
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Michael Hersch: Chamber Music
Label: Vanguard Classics (ATM-CD-1240)
Audio CD: February 10, 2004
String Soloists of the Berlin Philharmonic
Michael Hersch, piano
"... austere and uncompromising. What attracts the ear, and keeps it engaged, is Hersch’s acute ear for harmony. This manifests itself not only in the colours of the sounds themselves – but also in the way that glimmers of tonality emerge at key locations in a largely atonal landscape. But, then, Hersch clearly has an innate dramatic sensibility. His Octet is spread over 11 distinctly characterised movements (and at 31 minutes the largest work here), yet how inexorably it moves. The climax is placed in the 10th movement (and, interestingly, the dramatic shape of this movement appears to be a condensation of the work’s larger structure), while the final movement (a reprise of the second) serves as an anguished, angry and strangely familiar sounding epitaph. The effect is devastating.” -- Gramophone Magazine
“With Hersch, you hear a sincere, emotionally raw voice with every utterance – often a harrowing experience. ... urgent, commanding, able to communicate without shouting and without cliche.” -- Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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