Last Autumn Program Note by Aaron Grad

Michael Hersch's Last Autumn for horn and cello by Aaron Grad Michael Hersch attracted a bright spotlight early in his career. At 25, he won First Prize in the Concordia American Composers Awards, leading to a premiere in New York City’s Alice Tully Hall conducted by Marin Alsop. That same year he became one of the youngest composers ever awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Music. Still before his 30th birthday he became a Rome Prize recipient, and the following year was awarded the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin. Major orchestras began to regularly commission and perform his music, and Hersch’s large-ensemble catalog grew to include symphonies, concertos, and a range of other works. During his thirties, however, Hersch largely shifted away from orchestral music and began to explore increasingly expansive forms, trading ensemble heft for the freedom and focus of limited instrumentation. In 2001, he began what would become a pair of two vast pieces, completing the first of these, The Vanishing Pavilions, in 2005. The 2.5 hour work for solo piano in two books is built upon fragments of poetry by the British poet Christopher Middleton. Hersch premiered the 300+ page score himself—from memory. Writing in The Philadelphia Inquirer, music critic David Patrick Stearns noted, “The evening felt downright historic. [Hersch] conjured volcanic gestures from the piano with astonishing virtuosity. Everything unfolds in open-ended, haiku-like eruptions, though built on ideas that recur throughout the 50 movements ... Overtly or covertly, The Vanishing Pavilions is about the destruction of shelter - both in fact and concept - and life amid the absence of any certainty.” Immediately after completing The Vanishing Pavilions, Hersch turned to a sibling work, Last Autumn for horn and cello. He completed Last Autumn in 2008, and the piece was premiered the following year. For the performance of these works, and newer large-scale pieces such as his monodrama, On the Threshold of Winter (2012), Hersch relies on a select cadre of singers and instrumentalists. Cellist Daniel Gaisford is known especially for his highly regarded performances of Hersch’s two early Sonatas for Unaccompanied Cello, which Hersch completed in 1994 and 2000, respectively. Hornist Jamie Hersch has been performing his brother’s music for over twenty years. It was these two musicians and their particular skills and sensibilities that the composer had in mind when writing Last Autumn. There is one other key voice in this work, that of the late German novelist and poet W. G. Sebald (1944-2001). As in The Vanishing Pavilions, Hersch has excerpted fragments of poetry, ranging from a few words to a dozen or so lines. The text fragments are placed in the score, each relating to a specific movement, though the correspondences between text and music are not necessarily literal ones. The texts are not intended to be sung or spoken, but the presence of Sebald’s rich imagery reinforces the work’s tone. BOOK I