Michael Hersch: end stages, Violin Concerto

To my mind Michael Hersch has become one of the leading luminaries in High Modernism today. He convinces us that there is plenty of stylistic room at the top for the extension of the tradition into living times--and that he is charting a major foray into the zone with every new work. I am not alone in thinking that. If we needed further indication it has arrived decisively and happily in the major new disk that is upon us, a premier recording of end stages violin concerto (New Focus Recordings FCR 208). The 2015 Violin Concerto spotlights Patricia Kopatchinskaja as the solo violinist with the International Contemporary Ensemble in the capable hands of Tito Munoz. End Stages (2018) gets the attention of the Orpheus Chamber Ensemble. Both are essential; the final result shows an enlightened pairing.

What the two works do is widen our appreciation of the orchestral/concerted Hersch. Both works relate to one another with a seriality that is pleasing. Do both works have an expressive extremity that reaches out to a potentially menacing hugeness to call attention to the human presence in the universe? I hear that, even if perhaps the feeling is more Rorschachian than objective, if we really can relate feeling reactions absolutely to musical tones. And is there a total objectivity available to us in these matters? Not as far as I know. Not on this level.

The Concerto is meant to commemorate the life and passing of a friend. It was commissioned by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and violinist Kopatchinskaja. Some somber lines from two Thomas Hardy poems serve as epigrams. A sculpture by Christopher Cairns, "Stanchion", adds a kind of correlate to the music from the second movement onwards. Heroically bleak is perhaps the two words that most occur to me as I hear the work repeatedly. There is at the thickest points of the work a special strings against unstrings dichotomy to the music, with the solo part and the string section forming natural alliances and having the more to say while winds join in most appropriately at any rate but not much on their own so much as in tandem. Patricia takes the part with a muscular poeticism that drives forward the shape of the music and sets the pace that the orchestral groupings emulate and further admirably.

End Stages (2016) truly seems to continue the musical discourse set in motion by the concerto. It is a sparser, quieter meta-monstration on death and Hersch seems to lighten the burden of grief just a little to allow the sunlight to shine through the louvers of the wooden screen just enough for us to reclaim the boundaries and borders that mark us off from the "not we." If that seems whimsical to you, listen carefully to the music and you may feel it too, but it does not matter as much as the feelings that this music truly "means." The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra take over the musical chairs for this seven part briefer work.There is nothing lightweight or incidental about this music, but then Hersch happily seems incapable of meaninglessness.

If the music on this program is more bracing than joyful keep in mind that we do not remember, say, the story of Oedipus because it is chipper and warm-hearted! Music like literature need not be grinning at all times from ear-to-ear to involve us in serious openings onto a supra-human terrain. That Hersch can do this with increasing strikingness is a reason to rejoice anyway. We need as a species to do more than talk of walls and witch hunts! Lest we forget what makes us special, get this new volume and listen with care. Yes, there IS the new in New Music. This is one place to find it and hold on to it.

Like the generally unsung Alan Pettersson (1911-1980) there is a certain amount of biographical pain and anguish in Hersch's music. And so perhaps is there a personally quixotically macabre strain in Alfred Hitchcock. All artists put something of themselves in their work, no? We come to recognize it and so we come to understand something of the meaning of it all as we do.

Very strongly recommended for all Modernists who want to know that the journey continues.

-Grego Applegate Edwards, 8.3.2018, Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review

Hersch seems drawn to dark subject-matter, especially in the extended chamber works of his recent output, and much of what we said about his epic, bleak duo, Last Autumn (on writings by W.G. Sebald) (05Q093), applies here. The Images are the disturbing etchings in the 'Closed Ward' series from the 1960s by Michael Mazur (1935-2009), depicting patients in an insane asylum. These despairing, faceless figures, contorted and slumped into subhuman positions like living figures drawn from Hieronymus Bosch or Francis Bacon, evoke thirteen brief movements ranging from the desperately sad to the utterly desolate, with one episode of manic fury. The movements contrast in style, texture, degree of dissonance and depth of despair, though all share a basically slow pulse and a heavy tread of unison voicing, with relatively little contrapuntal writing - even the raging eleventh movement with its furiously clashing lines is underpinned by the consistent drumbeat of the unvarying oppression of the frantic soul's surroundings. Among the abrasive harmonies moments of lucidity occur, with the distant, detached calm of pre-tonal Renaissance music, as though the interior monologue of the distorted mind, forever unreachable, clings to fragmentary memories of beauty. The booklet reproduces a number of Mazur's pictures, matched with historical photographs, the briefest perusal of which shows the aptness of Hersch's interpretation of this gloomy, harrowing subject-matter.

The dynamic violin virtuoso Patricia Kopatchinskaja—who served as the music director of the prestigious Ojai Music Festival in 2018—was riveted by a piece of music composed by Michael Hersch that she stumbled across online several years go. Attracted by the intense power of the work, she tracked down and commissioned him to write Violin Concerto, which she plays here with trademark bravado, deftly supported by the International Contemporary Ensemble. The harrowing four-movement work took inspiration from a pair of poems by Thomas Hardy and a sculpture by Christopher Cairns, but it was written in response to the death of a friend, and there’s little doubt the music’s rigor and darkness were derived from that sense of loss. From the start, Kopatchinskaja relies on her technical brilliance, unleashing scratch tones and bruising intervals, but as the dissonance builds, her lines become more concentrated and tightly coiled. The piece slows, pitted by occasional rhythmic spasms, with the violin digging into a single pitch during the length of the third movement before fading into somnambulance, awash in weird harmonics. End Stages, commissioned and performed by Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, is no less brooding. Once again, the work was composed with death in mind, but inspired by a set of drawings by occasional collaborator Kevin Tuttle; the work moves toward acceptance of mortality with muted serenity.

-Peter Margasak, 8.28.2018, Best of Bandcamp Contemporary Classical August 2018

Michael Hersch’s Violin Concerto (2015) immediately hurls us into a wrenching scene. Trumpet and horn yelp a distressed fanfare as the remaining body of the 13-piece orchestra lurches forwards in convulsive dotted rhythms. A minute or so later the solo violin enters with slashing semitone double-stops, as if struggling to make its raspy voice heard.

This concerto, like much of Hersch’s recent work, can be interpreted as a musical battle of life and death – the composer is a cancer survivor and lost a close friend to the disease in 2009 – although I’d say it’s closer to unsparing reportage than emotional confessional. There are brief passages of fragile lyricism and an occasional glimmer of bittersweet nostalgia, but little respite, as even these quickly evaporate or splinter into violent spasm. Listen, for instance, at 2'12" in the second movement, where the solo violin slowly rocks back and forth (in D major/minor), wheezing like an ancient squeezebox; or to the yearning melody that unexpectedly blossoms at 2'56" in the third movement.

Patricia Kopatchinskaja, who commissioned the concerto, aptly describes it as ‘brutal and vulnerable at the same time’, and her performance conveys that dichotomy with ferocious commitment, aided with equal fearlessness by the International Contemporary Ensemble under Tito Muñoz. The music’s intense physicality and bleak atmosphere make for gripping, if harrowing, listening. What draws me to listen again and again is Hersch’s ability to communicate desperation that somehow never plummets into despair.

Hersch seems to find inspiration in the work of artists with a similar sensibility; the Violin Concerto is connected to a sculpture by Christopher Cairns, for instance, and has verses by Thomas Hardy as its epigraph. With end stages (2016), a set of seven aphoristic miniatures, the stimulus was a series of drawings by artist Kevin Tuttle (handsomely reproduced in the CD booklet). The first four are quite terse and suggest noirish cinematic fragments. Starting with the fifth, however, the emotions become more richly articulated – or, as Aaron Grad puts it in his perceptive booklet notes, the pieces ‘move progressively inward, rather than forward’. Ideally, I think the latter movements would benefit from a rawer sound than the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra give us here, but the performance’s cumulative power is considerable nonetheless.

-Andrew Farach-Colton, 10.2018, Gramophone

One of the most sepulchral and chilling albums of recent years is the Blair String Quartet’s 2014 recording of Michael Hersch’s Images From a Closed Ward. That one was inspired by Michael Mazur sketches made inside a Rhode Island mental asylum in the early 1960s. The latest recording of Hersch’s characteristically harrowing work is even more so, evoking the fitful last gasps and lingering pain of the final stages of terminal illness. Hersch’s Violin Concerto, performed by soloist Patricia Kopatchinskaja with International Contemporary Ensemble is paired with his end stages suite, played by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and streaming at New Focus Recordings.

The twisted march that introduces the concerto – arranged with an emphasis on strings rather than a full orchestra – kicks in with a savage downward slash from Kopatchinskaja. Within the first minute, the message is clear: the horror is going to be relentless. The brooding string quartets of Per Norgard are an antecedent. Kopatchinskaja’s role is less traditional soloist than member of the ensemble who gets the most shivery, terror-stricken lines and cruelly demanding cadenzas.

A sense of desperation pervades this piece, foreshadowing the suite to follow, Evil faces from every corner of the sonic picture peek out and then slash at each other, the horns rising over a cruel, emphatic low note from the piano. Astringent microtones linger side by side, a macabre march anchoring the shrieks overhead – not that anyone would want to be anchored in this skin-peeling acidity.

That’s the first movement. In the second, similar shrieks burst from accordion-like textures throughout as much welcome calm as there is, the occasional piano accent piercing the veil. The third is a vast, spacious, defeated tableau punctuated by funereal piano, a horrified fragment from the strings eventually leading to a horrified quasi-march with a frantic couple of duels amid the string section, then a series of cruelly sarcastic faux-fanfares. The stillness in the fourth remains constant and sadistically icy: Hersch’s orchestration is every bit as inventive as his music is disturbing.

end stages, which is also a microtonal work, begins with an austere mist punctuated by a sudden evocation of a scream or a brief moment of neoromantic clarity. The rest of the movements, many of them barely a minute or two long, shift from surreal, cinematic, conversational exchanges, to macabre dirges.

Bells and stark string horror permeate the third movement. There could be a death in a sudden pained cadenza here, and also in the grim codas of the fourth and fifth, puncturing their lingering, ghastly suspense. A sadistic parody of churchbells and grey-sky Shostakovian ambience sit side by side with long shrieking motives and every foreshadowing device ever invented, as these tortured voices stare down the end. This is the best piece of new orchestral music since Julia Wolfe’s Cruel Sister album, which was rated the best record of 2011 here. Look for this one on the best albums of 2018 page here at the end of the year.

-New York Music Daily/Lucid Culture, 10.5.18

Composer Michael Hersch consistently writes music with emotional immediacy that explores aching vulnerability with consummate eloquence. His Violin Concerto is like a wound still raw. Soloist Patricia Kopatchinskaja ramps up the intensity, as does ICE, conducted here by Tito Muñoz, rendering the work’s first and third movements with bracing strength and its second with fragile uneasiness. This emotion returns, amplified by high-lying solos and echoing attacks from the ensemble, to provide a tensely wrought close to the piece.

Orpheus Chamber Orchestra is renown for their conductor-less approach to chamber orchestra works. Still, the coordination and balance they exhibit on Hersch’s end stages deserves particular praise. Glacial slabs of dissonant harmonies give way to howling French horn and a buildup of contrapuntal intensity. This is succeeded by a tragically mournful tune accompanied by a bee’s nest of clusters and sliced string-led attacks. Taut wind dissonances then punctuate an angular, rambling string melody, succeeded once again by nervous pile-ups of angular crescendos. The seventh movement is buoyed by heraldic trumpet and vigorous repeated string chords, while the finale returns to a colorful, harmonically ambiguous ambience. The piece is Hersch at his most Bergian, bringing together artful organization and visceral emotion. Recommended.

-Christian Carey, 12.5.18, Sequenza21

There is the old expression, “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” The cover of this CD features two very affable-looking individuals, violinist Kopatchinskaja, and composer Hersch, looking over some music. Viewing that image one might expect the music to be similarly “affable.” Instead, one is given music of extreme intensity, angst and, at times, biting dissonance.

My first encounter with the music of Hersch was a broadcast recording of his First Symphony with the Pittsburgh Symphony conducted by Jansons. It was a tonal work, suggestive, at times, of the music of Shostakovich. Yet, it struck me as being far more depressing than anything written by Shostakovich. I was greatly impressed by the depth of expression and intensity in the music. Clearly, Hersch was reaching for the profound. His Piano Concerto seemed to continue his search for meaning in human existence. It is like a massive tone poem on the great tragedies of history. Far more dissonant than the First Symphony, it is filled with anger and despair, with but a few other worldly moments of repose. If you can accept the extreme dissonance in the music, you will be transported to places where few of us would choose to tread. This is gut-wrenching, profoundly moving music.

Much the same can be said of the first movement of the Violin Concerto, except the musical language is even more dissonant. The expression of angst is unrelenting. Not having a score was a major drawback to attempts to provide a reader with any meaningful comment on the organizational basis of the writing. I had no sense that his writing is formulaic, yet this is music of great complexity that can be brutal at times. At times I was reminded of the brutality that can be found in the symphony of Stefan Wolpe, a work I greatly admire. The second movement of the concerto is more reflective but, in its own way, equally disturbing. The third movement is, at times, in the nature of a lament, yet the anger remains. I must admit that, even with repeated listenings, I found it difficult to follow the logic in the third movement. After a time, it seemed a bit too much like it was all the same. The fourth movement is stark, yet a moving conclusion to a very troubling work.

According to the program notes, end stages was the result of a partnership with artist Kevin Tuttle. Some of Tuttle’s work can be seen in the booklet accompanying the disc. The program notes suggest that the work is about death. The music is reflective, haunting, and introspective in the extreme, while providing, at times, moments of repose. Tuttle’s images seem to depict the ravages of disease. Listening to this music, and looking at the images, made this listener question some of the fundamental notions of life and death. There is nothing peaceful about this music. It is stark and troubling. I found it to be profound.

Kopatchinskaja’s playing conveys a personality of a highly focused individual. There is an extreme intensity to her playing that demonstrates a total sympathy to the expression in the music. She comes across as a very strong-willed individual. Her technique appears to leave nothing to be desired. It almost seems as though this music was in her.

Without having a score, it is difficult to judge the efforts of the International Contemporary Ensemble, and the conducting expertise of Tito Muñoz. Yet, as best as I could tell, the music was performed with great precision. The playing of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra sounded perfectly coordinated and controlled. To my ears, they conveyed great expression to some profoundly disturbing, yet moving, music. The recorded sound is excellent.

-Karl F. Miller, 11.28.18, Fanfare

Violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja came across the music of contemporary US composer Michael Hersch entirely by chance, this compelling new CD’s booklet notes tell us. But the Violin Concerto that forms the disc’s raw, gripping high point is just one of several works she’s now commissioned from him.

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a more ideal musical partnership than between Kopatchinskaja’s hyper-expressive, minutely detailed, heart-on-sleeve playing and Hersch’s raw, shockingly visceral music.

In the Concerto’s first movement alone, its clangorous, furious chords, its brutal clusters and its screaming wind and brass make even a composer like Galina Ustvolskaya seem tame.

Kopatchinskaja is often submerged by Hersch’s thick, violent orchestral writing here, but she emerges in the remaining three movements with remarkably assured, eloquent playing of utter conviction.

She finds moments of dark lyricism in the second movement’s relentless ratcheting-up of tension, and she gives impassioned outbursts of fulsome sound in the lengthy, ruminative third movement. This is music you surrender to fully or not at all – its inspiration in the death of a friend and Hersch’s own brush with mortality are plain to hear.

And with her unashamed theatricality, Kopatchinskaja is the ideal interpreter.

There’s equally committed support from the International Contemporary Ensemble, and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra gives a supple, strongly characterised account of Hersch’s similarly visceral end stages, another death-themed work.

Recorded sound is rich, close and authentic.

-David Kettle, 3.18.19, The Strad

Violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja performs Michael Hersch's "Violin Concerto" with the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) in a recording that also includes Hersch's "End Stages," performed by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. According to violinist Kopatchinskaja, for whom the Violin Concerto was written, the formidably difficult work is as raw as an "an open wound." She said the music "moves me so deeply, makes me speechless, tolerates neither doubt nor objection. It is like a mountain one can’t ignore....Everything is crystal clear, there is no decoration, no superficial beauty, no compromises. Everything is exactly in place, has found its perfect form." Kopatchinskaja premiered the concerto in Saint Paul, Minnesota then gave its West Coast premiere at the 2018 Ojai Music Festival, where Kopatchinskaja was Music Director and Hersch was composer-in-residence.

-Laurie Niles, 8.3.18, Violinist.Com