Last Autumn
Last Autumn
Baltimore, MD
Completed in 2008, Michael Hersch's 2-hour work for horn and cello, Last Autumn, has been described by the Philadelphia Inquirer as a "portrait of something too huge and undefinable, glorious and terrible, to be seen in anything more than glimpses." A work "whose riches defy the harmonic limitations of the instruments. ... Together, they created wild portraits of alienated togetherness."
Performed here by hornist Jamie Hersch and cellist Daniel Gaisford, for whom the piece was written, Last Autumn is the second in a series of evening-length works written by the composer over the past decade.
The Philadelphia Inquirer continued, "Some of the best music was solo soliloquies. Periodic lullabies lamented while giving comfort. However large, the piece never sprawls. ... Poem fragments by W. G. Sebald quoted in the score begin with bleak and wintry images, giving way to visions of fertility before lapsing back into darkness.”
This is Hersch’s third release on innova Recordings, following 2013’s DVD/CD Suite from 'The Vanishing Pavilions' and 2014’s Images from a Closed Ward for the Blair String Quartet.
"concentrated, mysterious, riveting ... Hersch writes as though his life depended on it, as though everything were at stake." -- The New Criterion
"[W]orks that are often startling in their complexity, beauty and demonic fury." -- The New York Times
"... a mixture of urgency and facility that is dazzling." — The Washington Post
“... one of the most fertile musical minds to emerge in the U.S. over the past generation.” — The Financial Times
GAPPLEGATE CLASSICAL-MODERN MUSIC REVIEW
"There are few living composers who equal Michael Hersch for his seemingly natural abilities. His music comes across as virtually effortless, extremely lucid and inventive, loquacious in the best sort of way. [H]is compositions are … serious, dramatic, and no doubt require a great deal of effort on Hersch's part to get to where they are. Yet they have a kind of natural, conversational brilliance that lays well. … [Last Autumn] is a very ambitious, long and you might say heroic work for the unusual pairing of horn and cello. It touches on a contrasting set of moods and modes, from a brooding quietude, to exhilaration, to an almost brutal declamatory expressiveness. … I feel after hearing this work a good number of times that it is yet another landmark in what Michael Hersch represents to us today. There is an immediacy to the music, the expressiveness of beauty and brutality together, that belies the no doubt hard work that went into its making. Hersch's rather wide acceptance, unusual for such difficult music, may be due to the very human qualities of struggle, of storm and stress that you readily hear in the music. … Hersch continues to impress as one of the foremost compositional voices of our times. … Perhaps a masterpiece. You cannot afford to miss it if you want to get a sense of where modernism is going. Very much recommended." [FULL ARTICLE]
—Greg Edwards
