Michael Hersch – Zwischen Leben und Tod

Peter Sheppard Skaerved – Violin

Roderick Chadwick – Piano

St John’s Smith Square London

Live performance – 15th  November 2018

Recordings by Jonathan Haskell/Astounding Sounds

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Concert day – rehearsal recordings

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On the 15th November 2018 Roderick Chadwick and I gave the European premiere of Michael Hersch’s astonishing ‘Zwischen Leben und Tod’ at St John’s Smith Square. This marks the first public stage of a long process of study and practice of this masterpiece: for masterpiece it is.

A wonderful friendship in music. With Roderick Chadwick on stage, rehearsing Michael Hersch’s ‘Zwischen…’ on the 15th November 2018

This morning , the composer David Hackbridge Johnson, who was at the concert, sent me this thoughtful appreciation of Hersch’s music, and our performance. Do read!

Unlikely Solace: A Michael Hersch Premiere

By David Hackbridge Johnson

I remember page-turning for a performance of Sequentia Cyclica by Sorabji; not quite all 7½ hours of it but about a third of it, before being relieved by others with better eyesight.  A monster work even by his standards.  Hardly less epic are the Verdi Transcriptions of Finnissy or that same composer’s A History of Photography in Sound.  Extremophiles delight in such concerts; there is a sense in which music becomes both process and endurance, an arduous path to a new consciousness even.  Bring a cushion.  Michael Hersch’s Zwischen Leben und Tod has some of these qualities but is a piece not for piano alone but for violin and piano in equal partnership.  Hersch has not written a token modern work to be sandwiched and forgotten between warhorses; it is a bold and ultimately deeply moving work in 22 movements lasting over 90 minutes; each movement being based on an image by poet and playwright Peter Weiss.  This is the work I heard just yesterday (15th November 2018) at St. John’s Smith Square, a work played with expressive and scarcely believable virtuosity by violinist Peter Sheppard Skærved and pianist Roderick Chadwick.

The stage is set. Piano, microphones and screen, with the first Peter Weiss painting of Michael Hersch’s cycle – 1 Selbstporträt zwischen Tod und Schwester (1935) Self-Portrait between Death and Sister

Bosch-like scenes of orgiastic calamity, haunted airing courts of asylums, charnel houses of atrocity – just some of the indications of dark tragedy depicted in the Weiss paintings and projected last night in tandem with Sheppard Skærved and Chadwick’s performance.  But there are calmer visuals: a string quartet, a garden concert, a boy in the grounds of a country house.  Hersch’s responses to the images are not I think merely descriptive but explore the musical realisations of, as the composer himself puts it, ‘color and motion, of proportion’.  This sounds dispassionate but on the contrary, Hersch is also alive to emotive forces, most viscerally so.

As the paintings set up a dichotomy between the solitary (A Boy in the Garden, In the Courtyard of the Asylum, Self-Portrait) and the often brutally collective ( The War, Carnival, The Great World Theatre) so too the musicians often seem either isolated from each other in private dislocated reverie or else bound together in mass-hysterical outbursts; there are several set-pieces of moto perpetuo madness which jolt the listener from any sense that the music is allowing a drift to navel-staring solipsism.  Other oppositions are set up: a stark contrast between searing dissonance and plaintive modal writing (am I right in finding much of the music’s harmonic resolutions Baroque in provenance?), an hyper-virtuosity of extended techniques set against a molto semplice chiming of drones, quasi folk songs and lullaby figures, a Bergian clot of post-Romantic harmony followed by a sound redolent of a viol consort.  Hersch holds all these seemingly disparate aspects of the work together; if there is a residue of polystylism it is, as in the best works of Schnittke, totally absorbed into an overarching concept.  An allusive style then, allowing the work to reach deep in the past and into a realm of memory and consciousness.  And to bring all this to the present like memory’s gift.

How to ultimately structure a work of 22 movements becomes gradually clear.  What at first appear as fragments soon emerge as reoccurring gestures, fixed in behaviour and pitch, which underpin the whole work, as if running in and out of the 22 movements at a deeper level.  This entwinement: a kind of musical double helix.  The gestures constantly reappear like cartouches on an uneven rock face.

Gesture ceases to be metaphorical when the musicians are forced into certain postures by the extremity of what is asked of them.  This occurs when a colossal leap is asked of the violinist, or when the pianist contorts his body to reach inside the piano to pluck harmonics whilst playing normally at the same time.  Long or at least bendy arms needed.  Many times during the work Sheppard Skærved and Chadwick held poses after having created a sound; as if acting as characters in a drama.  A wordless opera with elaborate sets and two stage musicians who find themselves one minute in a country garden, the next on the butcher’s block in The Cannibal Kitchen.

Despite these scenes of loneliness and peril, after over 90 minutes between living and dying in Hersch and Weiss’ world, a curiously cathartic sense is achieved; a sense of something endured yet survived, a procession of bleak images in sound that somehow resists despair.  How haunting were the moments of resolution hinted at in certain passages in E flat minor!  And how tender the little modal clusters picked by the piano like a blessing of found fruit!  Here is true solace in a barren landscape.  It is to be hoped that this moving work reaches more listeners.  Zwischen Leben und Tod is a unique multi-layered creation and if milestones are needed in the violin and piano repertoire, then this surely is one.

I remember asking Jonathan Powell, the pianist in that memorable performance of Sequentia Cyclica, what he did to unwind after such a marathon.  ‘Walk 6 miles along the Thames or swim for a few hours’, was his reply.  I am informed that Peter Sheppard Skærved went straight out this morning to climb rocks.  Adequate training for extraordinary musical deeds no doubt.  For this page-turner – it was staying in with mugs of tea – writing this with the music of Michael Hersch still alive in my mind.

©David Hackbridge Johnson

LOFI Rehearsal recordings. St John’s Smith Square –9/11/18

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1 Selbstporträt zwischen Tod und Schwester (1935) Self-Portrait between Death and Sister

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2 Sketch from Parade (1945)

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3 Abschied von den Eltern (1962) A Farewell to Parents
3 Abschied von den Eltern (1962) A Farewell to Parents

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4 Im Musikzimmer (1937) In the Music Room

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5 Anatomie (1946) Anatomy

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6 Junge im Garten (1938) A Boy in the Garden

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7 Mysterienspiel (1934) Mystery Play

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8 Die Maschinen greifen die Menschheit an (1935) The Machines Attack Mankind

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9 Die Dampfwalze und der Drache (1940) The Steamroller and the Kite

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10 Illustration from Traktat von der ausgestorbenen Welt (1938/39) Illustration from Treatise of an Extinct World

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11 Meine Gefängnisse (1938) My Prisons

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12 Im Hof des Irrenhauses (1937/38) In the Courtyard of the Asylum

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13 Jahrmarktsleben (1940) Carnival

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14 Das Gartenkonzert (1938) The Garden Concert

22 Selbstbildnis (1946) Self-Portrait