About
Michael Nathaniel Hersch is an American composer and pianist.
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.
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."