Michael Hersch

American composer and pianist

Michael Nathaniel Hersch (born June 25, 1971) is an American composer and pianist. He currently serves as faculty at the Johns Hopkins Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, Maryland, where he completed his own studies in music composition. The New York Times has commented that he writes "extraordinarily communicative music" and that "Mr. Hersch's music speaks for itself eloquently".

Born in Washington, D. C., and raised in Reston, Virginia, Hersch was introduced to classical music at the age of 18 by his younger brother Jamie, who showed him a videotape of Georg Solti conducting Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. He began his studies at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore with Morris Cotel. In 1995 Hersch studied at the Moscow Conservatory, where he worked with Albert Leman and Roman Ledenev. That same year he also worked with John Corigliano, John Harbison, and George Rochberg at a program for young composers. Hersch then returned to Peabody for graduate studies, graduating in 1997 with a Master of Arts.

His first success came when Marin Alsop selected Hersch's Elegy as winner of the American Composers Prize, and conducted it at Lincoln Center in New York in 1997. That year also saw Hersch awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Music Composition. He has also been a fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center, where he studied under Christopher Rouse, the Norfolk Festival for Contemporary Music, and the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan. In 2000, Hersch was awarded the Rome Prize, in 2001 the Berlin Prize. While in Europe Hersch worked with Hans Werner Henze and Luciano Berio. Other honors include the Charles Ives Scholarship (1996) and the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship (2006) from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. Hersch's earliest recordings appeared on the Vanguard Classics label, the first released in 2003, with performances by the composer and the String Soloists of the Berlin Philharmonic. This was followed by two other Vanguard discs. The second, with Hersch performing his own work in addition to music of Morton Feldman, Wolfgang Rihm, and Josquin des Prez, was selected by The Washington Post and Newsday as among the notable recordings of 2004 05. In 2007, Hersch's multi hour piano cycle, The Vanishing Pavilions (2005), with the composer at the keyboard was released. David Patrick Stearns of The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote on the October 14, 2006 premiere of the work given by the composer.

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. Hersch has written a number of pieces premiered by Hong, including his one act opera POPPEA (2019) created alongside librettist Stephanie Fleischmann, which premiered in at the Festival ZeitRäume Basel and the Wien Modern Festival in 2021. The opera is a continuation of the story of the Roman Empress Poppea, picking up where Claudio Monteverdi's L'incornazione di Poppea ended. 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."

A highly regarded pianist, Hersch has performed throughout the U. S. and internationally. Though he appears in public infrequently, he commands a wide repertoire from Josquin to Boulez. Since 2000, he has primarily focused on performances of his own music.