Michael Hersch: Poppaea

Michael Hersch is a very distinct musical voice. His subject matter tends to be disturbing and his musical style is abrasive. One of his most recent works is the one act opera Poppaea which is based on the life of historical Poppaea after the point at which the Monteverdi opera leaves off. Strictly, it’s not set in Nero’s Rome but rather in a time and place inspired by it. The very effective libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann includes a distinctly non-classical take on space and time. It’s an exploration of overweaning ambition and where it leads which is about as relevant to today’s world as any theme could be.

The story arc is basically Nero marries Poppaea who produces a daughter. Octavia (Nero’s former wife) is forced to commit suicide. The child dies. Poppaea becomes increasingly disenchanted with Nero’s debauched behaviour but becomes pregnant again anyway. Most of what’s left of the old senatorial order is forced to commit suicide following the so-called “Pisonian plot”. In the aftermath of the famous fire Nero and Poppaea row furiously and Nero beats the pregnant Poppaea to death. Still obsessed with her, he has a pretty boy who looks like the dead woman castrated and marries him. This is staged in a series of scenes that aren’t strictly linear and sometimes involve characters in separate spaces being aware of what another is doing. Hence my earlier comment about space and time.

It’s violent musically as well as dramatically. Both Ah Young Hong, as Poppaea, and Silke Gäng, as Octavia, have extremely difficult parts which demand some stratospherically high singing (usually extended, vibrato-less phrases) combined with speech, whispering and much more. In contrast, Steve Davislim’s Nero merely combines much more conventional, and quite conversational, tenor singing with a fair bit of speech. There are also three Handmaidens; Svea Schildknecht, Vera Hiltbrunner and Francisca Näf, who also have some extremely challenging ensemble singing. There’s also a small chorus; Ensemble Solovoices, who also have some very demanding work to do.

The orchestral writing is atonal and abrasive. It’s scored for eighteen players including piano and it’s heavy on the wind section. There’s a lot of use of percussion and extended technique for winds and strings. It gets a fully committed performance from Ensemble Phoenix Basel and their music director Jürg Henneberger.

The recording is of a live performance at Don Bosco Basel in September 2021. It’s quite a busy staging so one notices a lot of stage noise. That aside though it’s very well recorded. I listened to a 48kHz/24 bit digital version and it’s excellent in every way. There’s also a very comprehensive booklet with the full text (very necessary as a lot of it is sung so high it’s impossible to make out) and essays on the background, the music, the drama and the dramaturgy.

It’s an interesting and disturbing work that I would love to see on stage (which is hardly likely to happen in Toronto!). Audio only, it’s still a pretty good way to experience a kind of music theatre that just doesn’t really get any play in North America and there are enough photographs in the booklet to get an idea of what the theatre experience was like.

Poppaea will be released on February 23rd 2024 in physical CD (two disks), MP3 and CD quality and hi-res FLAC.

— John Gilks, 1.04.2024

The early Roman empire, known for its power and affluence, its arrogance and violence, has for centuries been a source of ongoing attraction – often horrified attraction — to Western historians and artists. The doings and indiscretions of the leading figures of the time – the emperors and aristocrats, particularly as they’ve come down to us through Suetonius’ scandalous storytelling – are a natural source of material for opera. Suetonius is one of the sources behind composer Michael Hersch’s Poppaea (2019), a one-act opera with a libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann.

Hersch and Fleischmann present us with a wrenching work about Poppaea Sabina, second wife of the emperor Nero, who in turn was her third husband. Hersch’s isn’t the first opera to have Poppaea as a focal character; Monteverdi’s last opera was The Coronation of Poppaea, and she is given a central role in Handel’s opera Agrippina. The Poppaeas in these two earlier operas are quite different, the first being portrayed as a cynical manipulator – as she had been in Suetonius’s and Tacitus’ histories — and the second as an innocent caught up in vicious court politics. Hersch and Flesichmann’s Poppaea is more ambiguous and takes her place in a tragedy that, being shaped for contemporary sensibilities, puts the psychological lives of its two main female characters at its center.

Hersch’s music is appropriate to the complex and often traumatic events depicted. As he remarks in the accompanying booklet, “violence and cruelty becom[e] characters” in themselves, governing the relationships at the heart of the opera. His writing, accordingly, consists of a kind of neo-expressionism played out in acerbic and aggressive dissonance as well as in an ample use of extended techniques. With them, he is able to create large effects with relatively small resources. The orchestra on this recording, the Ensemble Phoenix Basel, comprises only eighteen pieces but thanks to Hersch’s orchestration and dynamics, for sheer force it often sounds like a full modern orchestra. A full orchestra held in a prolonged state of high tension: the composer effectively parallels the characters’ emotional extremes with his dramatic use of discordant, stentorian brass and harshly fused timbres of strings and winds. Similarly, his writing for the vocal parts keys up the tension by putting them in the outer reaches of their upper registers. Like the orchestra the cast is quite small, consisting of Poppaea, sung by soprano Ah Young Hong for whom the part was written; Nero, sung by tenor Steve Davislim; and Nero’s former wife Octavia, sung by mezzo-soprano Silke Gäng. These three are joined by a small female chorus and three handmaidens.

In the end, with Poppaea Hersch and Fleischmann give us a complicated and ultimately tragic character capable of being, in Ah Young Hong’s words, both monster and victim.

— Dan Barbiero, 2.22.2024

Nero, the megalomaniac, the monster – this is how the Roman biographer Suetonius paints the picture of the emperor. This image of Nero still dominates historiography to this day, even though current research offers a more nuanced picture of the emperor.

In Michael Hersch’s one-act play Poppaea – commissioned by the Wien Modern 2021 festival – Nero plays an important role as the string-puller, but is not the center of attention. The focus is on his mistress and later second wife, Poppaea, who is no less power-hungry and has her fiercest rival Octavia removed from her path.

Is Poppaea happy now? No, because shortly after her birth, the daughter she conceived with Nero dies, and Nero has nothing else to do but play the theater and strum the lyre.

Michael Hersch and his librettist Stephanie Fleischmann have succeeded in illuminating the torn characters of Poppaea and Octavia as if through a burning glass. The music is highly atmospheric, full of tension, and its agitation reflects the constant restlessness of the two protagonists: Poppaea in the spotlight, Octavia after her execution as her constant shadow. In the end, there are only losers in this intrigue: Poppaea cannot force Nero’s love, cannot control him, and ends up joining his list of victims, while Nero himself becomes the last direct descendant of the great Julius Caesar.

Ah Young Hong embodies Poppaea in the truest sense of the word. Her strong stage presence can even be heard in the recording. Scene 9 is particularly impressive – the slow death of Octavia, which Poppaea observes at close range and dialogues with the dying woman. Does she want to humiliate Octavia to the bitter end? Does she feel pity for her rival or is it the satisfaction of victory? Ah Young Hong expresses this irritating, frightening mixture of emotions with wonderful inner strength. With Silke Gäng (Octavia) as the scheming ghost and guilty conscience and Steve Davislim as the ruthless, heartless emperor, she has equally strong stage partners who turn this one-act play into a gripping personal drama.

— Guy Engels, 2.25.2024

https://relevanttones.com/2023/09/18/396-michael-hersch/?fbclid=IwAR3kKvWLnGHSzMgSQXERYkogrU5p5AskCSPKXJw-ZhjCKxqR2layWJDxccg

— Matthew Dosland, 3.15.2024

Apparently, many men are “still” thinking about ancient Rome – on TikTok, at least. Psychology professor Ronald Levant suggests that one reason may be increased loneliness, making boys and men “gravitate to a society that glorified male strength.”

But the Roman Empire is far from an exclusively male preoccupation. Librettist Stephanie Fleischmann teamed with composer Michael Hersch a few years ago to create Poppaea, an opera that premiered in Basel and Vienna in 2021. New Focus Recordings has now released a recording of the production. It reveals the opera as a howl of pain.

The Roman Women

Insecure 21st-century males may see ancient Rome as an ideal of masculine hegemony. But in Poppaea Hersch and Fleishmann turn the bloody story of Nero’s wife Poppaea inside out to look at these eventful years of the first century C.E. from the point of view of the women – Poppaea foremost, and her predecessor Octavia.

Without visual cues, the melodies read as abstract. They often leap up or down the scale, then settle on one note for the duration of a phrase. Half-note intervals abound, creating a tense, flattened affect. Still, within these strictures, or perhaps because of them, the primary voices – Ah Young Hong in the title role, Steve Davislim as Nero, and Silke Gäng as Octavia – capture emotions at their rawest.

Putting meat on these dry vocal bones is the instrumental score. Growling, crashing, dissonant, it breathes hoarsely, mutters, stabs – a harsh musical pneumonia.

As a pure listen, Poppaea is not a pleasant experience. But then why have I returned to it three times (so far), and why do I feel an urge to write about it? “Urge” is the right word, I think, as in “urgency.” In this conception, Nero’s wives have something urgent to say – about family, history, and myth, and above all about their place in the world as women.

Case in point: Nero and Poppaea’s wedding scene, far from being a celebration, devolves into a nightmarish mob scene. The crowd, loyal to the popular Octavia, smashes the new empress’s statue.

Octavia Agonistes

Octavia’s aria in Scene V recounting a series of murders is emblematic of Hersch’s approach. About Nero’s assassination of her beloved brother Britannicus, she sings “I was gutted then” in an angular flatted-fifth interval. Then a simple fifth chord, which amid all the dissonance has the effect of a major chord, settles in for just a moment, before Octavia resumes the melody on a completely unrelated note. She closes out the aria in a breathless speaking voice: “There is no one, nothing for me here but death.”

And that’s how Act I ends, with Poppaea witnessing Octavia die by bleeding out in a bathtub.

In Act II, Poppaea in a bath of milk gives birth to a daughter, but only after “Watching myself retch, heaving – disgorging an ancient, wasted crone out of my mouth.” When the Chorus celebrates the birth, they do so “even as the earth quakes, boding ill.”

Indeed baby Claudia Augusta lives only a few months. As Nero mourns, his wife and the ghost of his ex chime in, a dissonant half-step apart. “I have died with her,” wails Nero. “The truth,” Octavia’s ghost sings with the gravitas of personal experience, “is nothing but death.”

Often the opera itself seems to deal in “nothing but death.” Nero plays his lyre as Rome burns, but we hear not harmonious strains but chilling shrieks from the Chorus and violent tone clusters from piano and winds with descending flute-flutters as of ash raining down. Trombone and percussion lead a kind of staggered dirge. The penultimate scene shows Poppaea finally confronting Nero, accusing him of responsibility for the fire, not to mention general debauchery and degeneracy. Yet they make love again, and our heroine conceives.

Poppaea and Nero: The Brutal End

Even when husband and wife sing together of their new hope, they cannot do so in harmony. And of course, the hope the new pregnancy represents is dashed. In a dramatic climactic scene, what sounds like a distorted bassoon announces Poppaea’s imminent expiration. She sings to her unborn child in one of the score’s rare passages of handsome melody: “Now sleep, a tender, unsullied sleep.”

Poppaea’s brutal death at her husband’s hands may be factual – we don’t know for sure what killed her. But “the truth is” indeed “nothing but death.” The opera ends with the Chorus, in a whispery gasp unaccompanied by any music, recounting a sorry dénouement.

Much as their heroine turns herself inside out in that milky tub, Hersch and Fleischmann turn the ultimate Roman tale of masculine hubris inside out. If the result is a shriek of pain, we can make of that what we will. The disturbingly compelling Poppaea is available now on a two-CD set and digitally.

— Jon Sobel, 3.17.2024

At the end of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea, a woman who had become the mistress of the Emperor Nero achieves the ultimate power grab by displacing the Empress Octavia and being jubilantly crowned queen. The stain of venality and murder is minimal compared with the wholesale vilification of Nero by Roman historians. As a postlude to the events in Monteverdi’s opera, the noted American composer Michael Hersch’s one-act opera, Poppaea, rounds out the story, highlighting incidents in the lurid, violent career of Poppaea, ending with her death. The cavalcade on stage of torture, murder, debauchery, and the lust for power roughly conforms to the worst that history has to say about Nero and his conniving second wife.

The twists introduced by Hersch and librettist Stephanie Fleischmann leave Roman history behind to grapple with contemporary issues—the suggestion is made that the setting of the opera doesn’t even need to be ancient Rome. We are presented with an allegory of corrupt, authoritarian villainy across the board. Rubrics like “patriarchy” and “sexual politics” hang in the air. At the beginning and end of the opera Nero savagely beats a pregnant Poppaea to death, an invention that is excusable, given that much of the obloquy heaped on Nero’s head by Suetonius in The Twelve Caesars, the chief source for Nero’s satanic image, is based on rumor and legend.

The underlying aim, politically speaking, that Poppaea represents is feminist. Poppaea is displayed as a powerful woman who held the reins of empire. Saddled with an incompetent, depraved husband, it is she who orders the execution of the aristocratic conspirators against him. That history doesn’t acknowledge her (conjectured) power is evidence of patriarchal blindness and its denigration of women. As soprano Ah Young Hong says in a booklet interview, “Ultimately, I believe Poppaea was a victim. A monster, too. But, a victim nevertheless. She was so blinded by what she wanted in life. I believe she just wanted to be loved.”

Such a claim verges on inanity if it refers to the historical Poppaea, who was as unpopular with Romans as Nero’s first wife, Octavia, was popular—there were riots in the streets when at the news that Nero wanted to divorce Octavia in favor of Poppaea. He did the expedient thing, first sending Octavia into exile, then having her murdered. But as a description of the woman created for the purposes of an opera, Hong’s merging of a monster and a woman who only wanted to be loved is appropriate. (Monteverdi ended his opera with an ecstatic love duet between Nero and Poppaea.)

You can put much of this behind you to appreciate the triangle between Nero, Octavia, and Poppaea for what it is, a juicy story. A lot has happened musically since the time of L’incoronazione di Poppea, but the same is true of two violent, bloody operas, Elektra and Tosca. The era of Expressionism and the avant-garde gave free rein to shock values on a more savage scale. But as I commented reviewing an earlier Hersch work, “Shock decreases with repetition, and it takes real imagination to combine satisfying musical values with an unquiet mood that shakes the listener.”

Hersch goes all out to make this happen, beginning with the extended anguished cries of Poppaea as she suffers Nero’s beating. Hersch has reduced the narrative to the three main characters, enveloping them in a harsh Expressionist idiom. Strauss’s taste for screaming dissonance as a theatrical device in Elektra and Salome becomes a generalized part of Hersch’s score, and he isn’t shy about injecting lurid horror-movie chords. The orchestra is a chamber ensemble with only five strings but a full complement of woodwinds, brass, and percussion, whose sound predominates.

Over a hundred minutes of post-avant garde eeriness and violence asks a lot of the listener, and I’m sorry that this live performance from Basel wasn’t released on video—the photos of the staging are riveting. Moreover, it really takes the physical presence of Hong’s Poppaea to convey the sympathetic and victimized side of the character. Even so, if you are attuned to New Music, or if you admire the extreme vocal techniques in a contemporary opera like Thomas Adès’s The Tempest, Hersch’s musical language will impress you. His ability to create atmosphere is endlessly inventive, and like Adès he is a master orchestrator.

The title role was tailored to Hong’s voice, a coloratura soprano with a high range (not incidentally, although a specialist in contemporary music, Hong has also sung the lead in Monteverdi’s opera). Vocally, the role is a tour de force for her, but there is excellent singing by mezzo Silke Gäng as Octavia and the veteran Australian tenor Steve Davislim—they successfully meet the considerable demands of their roles.

Following along with the libretto is necessary, given that the extremes of vocal technique in New Music render clear enunciation nearly impossible. This brings up the one major drawback of this recording. The staging was in the round, which makes it difficult for the recording engineers, and they haven’t succeeded well enough—the singers are always distant and sometimes too far away to be heard except faintly over the orchestra. Unless you can tolerate this deficit, Poppaea is crippled as a recording.

That’s a shame, because a great deal of talent is on display here, in a major New Music opera that is grippingly dramatic and musically remarkable. I can’t refrain from commenting that the booklet contains thousands of words, most of them devoted to explaining the issues of gender politics that Poppaea revolves around. Except for the initiated and truly committed, the program notes are well worth skipping.

— Huntley Dent, 5.26.2024

Past and present collide in Hersch’s devastating one-act opera, which looks at the Ancient Roman tale of Nero and the women caught up in his world of violence, corruption, and absolute power. Typically for Hersch, he zeroes in without hesitation on very modern themes of trauma, resilience, and self-actualization. His longtime collaborator, the genius soprano Ah Young Han, puts in her finest, most concentrated performance, which is saying something. Support is too strong a word for the spellbinding work of Steve Davislim (Nero) and Silke Gang (Octavia), Ensemble Solovoices, and Ensemble Phoenix Basel, conducted by Jürg Henneberger, who all surround Hong with commitment and complexity. Poppaea is a landmark piece and this is a recording to match it.

— Jeremy Shatan, 6.10.2024

Poppaea is the recent release from New Focus Recordings of a one-act opera in twelve scenes composed by Michael Hersch on a libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann. The 2019 opera, commissioned by Wien Modern and ZeitRäume Basel, is heard here in a live recording of a 10 September 2021 performance at Don Bosco Basel in Basel, Switzerland. The performance features the Ensemble Phoenix Basel under the baton of Jürg Henneberger with direction by Markus Bothe. The opera examines the quasi-historical tale of the Roman emperor Nero and his ill-fated relationship with his two wives, Octavia and Poppaea, portrayed respectively by tenor Steve Davislim, mezzo-soprano Silke Gäng and soprano Ah Young Hong. Three additional characters - the Handmaidens - are portrayed by Svea Schildknecht, Vera Hiltbrunner and Francisca Näf, and the opera features the Ensemble SoloVoices in the role of the Chorus. The release is available in a two-disc CD format as well as a digital album, and the substantial booklet includes an essay by Neronian history scholar Lauren Donovan Ginsberg, essays by various members of the production team (Hersch, Fleischmann, Bothe, dramaturge Bernhard Günther and set designers Heinrich Toews and Ioannis Piertzovanis), an interview with Ah Young Hong, a timeline of historical events informing the libretto, the English-language libretto itself and numerous photos from the production.

The Poppaea story is one which has been part of the Western operatic tradition for nearly its entire four-century history, a fact to which the Fleischmann-Hersch work consciously aims to respond. The new opera takes the action beyond where the plot of Monteverdi's influential 1642 opera left off, depicting how Poppaea ultimately meets a similar fate to that of her predecessor Octavia, despite Nero's promises. In addition, it attempts to retell the story from the perspectives of both Octavia and Poppaea. In so doing, as the various essays and interviews in the booklet attest, this project is meant to do more than simply revisit and stylistically modernize a classic story. It is an act of centering the perspectives of women in an artistic-historical narrative which has not traditionally centered those perspectives. By addressing both the relative lack of information about these women in the relevant Roman sources and the 'triumphant' Neronian treatment of the story in Monteverdi's setting, the collaborative team hopes to put the audience in a novel perspective of feeling systemically disempowered through whimsically cruel means - as Octavia and Poppaea themselves were.

The resulting opera, sonically speaking, is a one-hundred-minute continuous experience of violent explosiveness whose only respites are moments of quiet anxiety that the onslaught will soon resume again. Hersch achieves this sustained effect through the judicious use of a completely atonal - and frequently microtonal - sound world which remains at all times rhythmically, timbrally and dynamically unpredictable. The compositional material seems to be deliberately athematic, such that the audience is never given any sonic 'footing' upon which to make sense of what has happened or what might happen next. This, however, seems highly appropriate for the subject matter of the libretto, which constantly shifts between scenes of murder, torture, assault, traumatic flashbacks and vindictive public rage with no moments of peace or resolution in between.

As Poppaea herself sings in the final scene, 'This world - You are released'. In other words, death itself is taken as the only release from the endless and powerless torment of her world. Likewise, the silence after the opera's conclusion is the audience's only release from its meticulously cacophonous musical expression.

Nonetheless, despite this sustained brutal emotional effect of the sonic composition, Hersch shows a remarkable sensitivity to the variety and freshness of detailed sonic parameters along the way. He makes full use of the timbral palette available within the chamber orchestra, including strings, piano, brass, woodwinds and percussion. Complex sound masses, for example, alternate with pointillistic textures, single sustained tones and various combinations thereof. From a harmonic standpoint, chromatic passages alternate with quarter-tone harmony, unpitched sounds and overtone-conscious sound masses bordering on the spectralistic. In short, this is perhaps just about as rich and varied a timbral palette as one could imagine using the given instrumentation through purely acoustical (non-electronic) means.

All of this compositional care on Hersch's part serves to help deliver a dramatic message which is at once confrontational and illuminating. It is also one which seems to successfully fulfill the goals expressed for the opera in all of the interviews and essays in the booklet. More than simply conveying the colossal degree to which the women in this Neronian world are subjugated, tormented and silenced, the opera arguably offers a keen and crucial insight into the nature of rage itself. The emperor, his wives, the handmaidens and the Roman mob all possess different degrees of social power. Nonetheless, they are united in being somehow impacted by the feral, impersonal and contagious force of rage, a force to which all of humanity is susceptible regardless of station or circumstance. The tragedy of rage is, perhaps, that it naturally tends to explode beyond the bounds of reason, even when the initial grievances that trigger it are completely reasonable. The enraged responses of the subjugated are thus all too often taken as convenient evidence of their supposedly 'unreasonable' perspectives, a vicious propagandistic cycle by which an unjust status quo is easily reinforced. Such is the state of affairs in Poppaea's world and, indeed, in many corners of our own.

In summary, Fleischmann and Hersch's Poppaea is an extremely ambitious, difficult and necessary opera that forces humanity to confront the way it mythologizes the dynamics of power and justice. This is by no definition an opera that is easy to experience, which makes the extraordinary care that went into its conceptualization, realization and album curation all the more impressive as a testament to the dedication of the entire team involved. This truly is a story of relentless ugliness, beautifully conveyed in high fidelity. Yet it is also an opera which I believe has the genuine power to transform the outlooks of receptive audiences. When experienced within the context of the crucial booklet materials, Poppaea reveals itself to be a mirror unto humanity and the mechanisms by which some of its darkness traits operate. It is, for this reason, an opera which I am very grateful to see in the contemporary repertoire.

— John Dante Prevedini, 6.12.2024

Even if you were not aware of the details of the violence of Roman rule during the early Anno Domini era you will feel its effects in the pit of your stomach as you listen to the operatic recreation of the story of the Empress Poppaea.

On one level, Michael Hersch’s recreation of Poppaea Sabina (30AD-65AD), the second wife of the legendary imperial despot Nero, may be a simple tale of palace intrigue. However, there seems to be a much deeper motive in this shrill, masterful retelling of the tragedy. And it is this: The conniving woman who won the heart and hand of the emperor and bore him a child, appears to have created a powerful, matriarchal rule in the imperial household.

Brilliantly detailed booklet notes by Dr. Lauren Donovan-Ginsberg, Associate Professor of Classical Studies at Duke University and a specialist in Neronian culture and history, make for riveting reading. Stephanie Fleischmann’s prescient libretto recreates the bloody and devious plot.

Poppaea – played with shrill and terrifying ingenuity by the soprano Ah Young Hong – tears Nero (an appropriately despotic tenor Steve Davislim) away from his first wife Octavia, superbly sung by the dark and smoky-voiced mezzo Silke Gäng.

You will also find yourself harbouring high praise for the superb casting and performances, and especially for the sensitive and vigorous direction of Jürg Henneberger who brings this Neronian tragedy of Poppaea to vivid life once again.

— Raul da Gama, 6.11.2024

The composer Michael Hersch tells the tale of Nero from different angles, where a powerful delivery from multiple voices and libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann is present.

Disc 1 starts the listen with a firm mood, where Poppaea and Nero sing of how the birth of their child will negate all the problems associated with Nero killing his mother, as Steve Davislim’s tenor, via Nero, unfolds across tense and dark musicianship. At the end, during Poppaea Witnesses Octavia’s Death, mysterious keys and a gentle ambience are met with Silke Gäng’s stunning mezzo-soprano.

Disc 2 begins with the crashing sounds of Milk Bath, before a dense and ominous climate builds, while The Great Fire is indeed intense and allows for Ah Young Hong’s booming soprano to guide the bristling dynamics. This World exits the story, and is distinctly intimate, though in a way that’s unsettling and cryptic.

The dialogue follows Octavia in her cell awaiting death, where the orchestral manipulation and profoundly detailed singing resonates in a contemporary opera fashion via the exhilarating vision thanks to Hersch.

— Tom Haugen, 11.05.2024

Typically for Hersch, he zeroes in without hesitation on very modern themes of trauma, resilience, and self-actualization. His longtime collaborator, the genius soprano Ah Young Hong, puts in her finest, most concentrated performance, which is saying something.

— Jeremy Shatan, 12.19.2024