Michael Hersch - Vanishing Pavilions - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Composer Michael Hersch's string quartet, performed here with absolute commitment by the New York based FLUX Quartet, is inextricably connected to his friendship with the late American artist Michael Mazur. More specifically, Hersch was inspired by a series of etchings and lithographs Mazur did of inmates in a Rhode Island mental asylum in the 1960's. In his musical depiction of these images, Hersch writes music that is at times aggressive and disturbing and at other times wistful, but always with the profound intensity of a deeply sensitive nature. Mazur wrote of Hersch's music InchThese compositions are filled sometimes with frightening sounds. They are unrelenting, nearly without hope... But no artwork can be without hope since it is in the very nature of creative work to be optimistic, if only in as much as we continue to work through everything but our own death.Inch

Michael Hersch - Across ... In Grief And Detail [COMPACT DISCS] date 04/03/2026

Long-established as a leading voice among composers of his generation, Michael Hersch is also one of the great pianists of our time. This special CD/DVD package includes Hersch performing his InchSuite from the Vanishing PavilionsInch live in concert, his first appearance as a pianist in New York City in over a decade. Also included is a film of that performance and a documentary, the Sudden Pianist, focusing on Hersch's music for the piano and his performance of it.