Composer Michael Hersch Reveals 2026-27 Performance Lineup

At Manhattan's MISE-EN_PLACE this fall, Spectrum NYC will present its second three-day festival dedicated to Michael Hersch's music, featuring two New York City premieres, the chance to hear one of the composer-pianist's increasingly rare public performances of his own work, and performances by some of his closest collaborators, including soprano Ah Young Hong, violinist Miranda Cuckson, cellist Coleman Itzkoff, and the FLUX Quartet (Oct 2–4). To celebrate KAIROS Music's recent release of their all-Hersch album, across … in grief and detail, Ah Young Hong and the Wolftone duo reprise all three works from the recording at New York's DiMenna Center (Nov 4). The coming season also brings three world premieres of the composer's music: Philomela Fragments in Chicago (Oct 16), Agamemnon Fragments in Baltimore (Dec 5), and his new Oboe Concerto in the Netherlands next spring (April 22 & 23).

Spectrum NYC presents three-day Hersch festival (Oct 2–4)

In 2016, Spectrum NYC presented its first dedicated Hersch festival, a rendition of Hersch's early piano cycle The Vanishing Pavilions. Now, ten years on, Spectrum offers a second three-day festival devoted to Hersch's music, now at MISE-EN_PLACE, its new Harlem home (Oct 2–4). In Program 1 (Oct 2), the FLUX Quartet performs Images from a Closed Ward, a 13-movement string quartet inspired by etchings of scenes from a 1960s psychiatric hospital by the late American artist Michael Mazur, who was one of Hersch's friends. 

Next follows Program 2 (Oct 3), which intersperses selections from Fourteen Pieces after Primo Levi for unaccompanied violin and a tearing loose from matter for violin duo, along with the New York City premieres of oaks cut for the pyre and Trauerrefrain: songs after texts of Anja Utler, two chamber works featuring soprano Ah Young Hong, for whom they were written. A soprano, Hong is one of the foremost exponents of Hersch's music.

The soprano also takes part in Program 3 (Oct 4), which features Hersch's arrangements for soprano and string quartet of songs by Franco-Flemish Renaissance composers Josquin des Prez and Orlande de Lassus. These will be heard alongside three of his solo instrumental works: the weather and landscape are on our side for unaccompanied violin, performed by Miranda Cuckson, the Second Cello Sonata, performed by Coleman Itzkoff, a trusted Hersch interpreter; and excerpts from The Vanishing Pavilions, performed by the composer himself. 

Album release concert at NYC's DiMenna Center (Nov 4)

Earlier this year, KAIROS Music released across … in grief and detail, comprising three recent chamber works exploring illness, memory, and corporeal vulnerability: Miserere mei Domine and sapped from me broken, both scored for soprano, violin, and bassoon, and the title track, across ... in grief and detail for violin and bassoon.

Drawing inspiration from poets Christopher Middleton and Anja Utler and from composers Sweelinck and Robert Schumann, Hersch wrote the three compositions for three of his longtime collaborators: bassoonist Ben Roidl-Ward and violinist William Overcash, collectively known as the duo Wolftone, and – as at MISE-EN_PLACE – soprano Ah Young Hong. In a free program at New York's DiMenna Center, the three artists reunite to celebrate the album release with live accounts of all three works from the album (Nov 4).

Fall world premieres: Philomela Fragments (Oct 16) & Agamemnon Fragments (Dec 5)

Hersch completes his fall lineup with the world premieres of two new works inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses in translations by Stephanie McCarter, Sarah Ruden, and Anne Carson. The first of these is Philomela Fragments, scored for soprano, flute, and double bass, which receives its first performance from Ah Young Hong and the Terns Duo in the “Sounding/BODY” Series at Chicago's International Museum of Surgical Science (Oct 16). Comprising new music specialists Sasha Ishov on flute and Will Yager on double bass, the recently-formed Terns Duo also joins Hong for the Baltimore premiere of Philomela Fragments in “The Roaring Tides: Greek Tragedy in Image and Sound,” the second installment of an ongoing series examining the connections between contemporary music and antiquity, presented by the Johns Hopkins Department of the History of Art in collaboration with the Peabody Institute. The event's centerpiece is the world premiere of Hersch's second new Ovid-inspired composition, Agamemnon Fragments, by baritone Nathaniel Sullivan, a top prizewinner in the Washington International Competition, and clarinetist Gleb Kanasevich (Dec 5). The composer explains:

Spring highlights: Oboe Concerto world premiere (April 22 & 23) & more

A third world premiere follows next spring, when Christopher Bouwman and the New European Ensemble give the first accounts of Hersch's new Oboe Concerto in The Hague and Utrecht (April 22 & 23). The work marks the composer's first exploration of the concerto form since his Violin Concerto of 2015. His other 2027 highlights include performances of Trauerrefrain and Absalon, fili mi by Ah Young Hong and the earspace ensemble in Chapel Hill (Jan 15) and Philadelphia (Feb 4); excerpts from Images from a Closed Ward at the Towson University New Music Ensemble's 25th Anniversary Concert in Towson, MD (April 13); the world premiere of a new work for soprano and percussion, together with unwrung, apart, always for solo flute, in Rome and Bologna (May 22 & 23); and new recordings of his music by the Kreutzer Quartet, Talea Ensemble, and loadbang ensemble (details to be announced).

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