In person, the American composer Michael Hersch usually comes across as a gentle soul, an unassuming, soft-spoken, painfully shy man. So people are often surprised when they first hear his daring, ferociously aggressive music. Imagine a tabby cat with a Siberian Tiger’s roar, and you get the idea.
On Thursday night, violinist Carolyn Huebl and pianist Mark Wait presented the world premiere of Hersch’s dauntingly difficult Zwischen Leben und Tod at the Blair School of Music’s Turner Recital Hall. Hersch found inspiration for this ambitious, evening-length piece in the surreal and often psychologically unsettling artwork of Peter Weiss. Huebl and Wait confronted this music head on, leaving none of the work’s darkly disturbing emotional stones unturned.
Weiss, a 20th century German-born author, artist and experimental filmmaker, often created paintings of anguished people in bleak, devastated landscapes. Hersch responded to 22 of these artworks, composing a multimovement, expressionistic sort of Pictures at an Exhibition. During Thursday’s concert, Weiss’ art was projected on a large screen above the stage. Hersch’s music, for its part, captured the emotions of these works with uncanny accuracy.
In the opening piece, “Self-Portrait Between Death and Sister,” Hersch wrote spare, dissonant, mournful music to suggest the spectral images in Weiss’ sketch. In “A Farewell to Parents,” which shows a youth looking casually through binoculars while an ocean storm rages in the background, Hersch composed tempestuous music of diabolical difficulty. He followed that maelstrom with “In the Music Room,” a short, lyrical fragment that provided the listener with a kind of safe harbor. More mayhem, however, was to come.
Weiss’ “The Machine’s Attack Mankind” has the look of a zombie apocalypse — the painting shows tormented people wandering through a devastated city. (The artist depicts himself in this work, standing in the ruins of house, painting one of his bleak, gray landscapes.) Hersch responds with a sort of War of the Worlds soundtrack, a mechanical and maniacal perpetual motion piece that pounded our psyches.
The highlight of the concert, and Hersch’s most significant achievement, was the final piece, “Self-Portrait.” Hersch composed a soul-searching musical meditation to complement the painting. Without question, the music perfectly matched the serious, contemplative expression seen in the artist’s face.
Hersch was absolutely merciless in the demands he made on the performers. Huebl and Wait were more than equal to these challenges, though, and they played every note with power, precision and emotional conviction.
Zwischen Leben und Tod is the second Hersch masterpiece premiered at Vanderbilt in recent years — the Blair String Quartet premiered the composer’s Images from a Closed Ward in 2012. The Blair School of Music and its dean, Mark Wait, deserve high praise for bringing this great music to life.
