Michael Hersch is a talented composer, no doubt about it, and there’s a lot to admire here. The Second Symphony starts with music of great energy, and it’s wonderful to hear a work that launches itself with a bang instead of wasting time on pretentious preludial nonsense. In this respect, Hersch’s style recalls that of Magnus Lindberg, though he’s a bit more frankly melodic than the Finnish composer (at least until recently), particularly in this same work’s third movement. I also admire the way that Hersch sustains the intensity of the First Symphony’s nearly half-hour, single-movement span. There’s very little sense of time wasted or (more importantly) dragging. So on this basis alone I can recommend this disc to fans of good contemporary music.
However, and despite the wide range of contrasts in terms of both tempo and texture that Hersch employs, he really needs to offer more than the expression of misery and suffering on the one hand, and a tenuous, fragile lyricism on the other. Whatever happened to music that entertains, that offers humor, lightness, and playfulness? Isn’t there more to the human experience than one man’s determined attempt to be deeply serious at all costs? In big works, such as the two symphonies, you can argue that there’s room to take on some heavier issues; but who wants to hear, in shorter pieces such as Fracta and Arraché, what sounds like “sorrow and dread’s greatest hits”? The romantic period ended nearly 100 years ago, yet so many composers today still feel that in order to be taken seriously they have to self-indulgently wallow in rage, despair, and tragedy to the exclusion of just about everything else.
For what my opinion is worth, and I know it’s not much, I would like to see a talented guy like Hersch take a step back and write music wider in range and more varied in mood (assuming he can). Otherwise he’s going to wind up sounding like your average, run-of-the-mill contemporary music composer, a person well-trained, gifted at orchestration, but expressing little that we haven’t heard before, and even less that we’d care to encounter again. Certainly Marin Alsop and the Bournemouth Symphony play the music with the necessary commitment and energy, and they are very well recorded, but this is the kind of thing you respect more than you enjoy. And if Hersch wants people to come back to him, to care about what he has to say and look forward to his next statement, he’s going to have to do better than that.
