Press

On the Threshold of Winter opens the Corcoran New Music Festival The Washington Post, November 4, 2018
By Anne Midgette
Full Article

Sunday Profile:
"A Survivor, Inspired by Love and Loss"
Michael Hersch’s New Opera Reflects on a Friend’s Death The New York Times, June 20, 2014
By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER
Full Article

Michael Hersch's On the Threshold of Winter at the American Visionary Festival The Utah Review, February 9, 2018
By Les Roka
Full Article

Desolation Row: Soprano, Dal Niente give searing advocacy to Hersch’s operatic meditation on death Chicago Classical Review, January 21, 2018
By Lawrence A. Johnson
Full Article

Opera Review:
Inner Musings on a Precarious Descent The New York Times, June 26, 2014
By CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM Full Article

Goings on About Town
Michael Hersch’s “On the Threshold of Winter” The New Yorker, June 25, 2014 Full Article

Opera Review:
An unsettling monodrama, a tour de force performance at Peabody The Baltimore Sun, October 5, 2015
By Tim Smith Full Article

Opera Preview:
In his opera On the Threshold of Winter, composer Michael Hersch ventures into the anguished world of the terminally ill Nashville Scene, October 29, 2015
By John Pitcher Full Article

Opera Review:
Michael Hersch's first opera an unconventional take on life and death The Baltimore Sun, June 20, 2014
By Tim Smith Full Article

Opera Preview:
Operă americană în premieră mondială pe versuri de Marin Sorescu Cotidianul, July 1, 2014 Full Article

'Winter' is a deeply personal debut opera for Peabody's Michael Hersch JHU Hub Magazine, June 30, 2014
By Bret McCabe Full Article

Mourning Through Music: Michael Hersch in Conversation with Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson Johns Hopkins Health Review
Fall/Winter 2015 Volume 2 Issue 2 Full Article

"... a work of great originality, daring, and disturbing power"
— The Baltimore Sun

"The two-act monodrama, which received its searing premiere on Wednesday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, is about illness and death ... A traumatized silence clung to the Fishman Space auditorium after the last line sung by the soprano Ah Young Hong, the opera’s blazing, lone star: “Terrible is the passage/ Into the fold/ Both for man/ And /Animal.” ... Death casts a long shadow over the recent work of Mr. Hersch, who lost a close friend to cancer while battling the disease himself. But in 'On the Threshold of Winter' Mr. Hersch has given himself the space to burrow past anger and incomprehension in search of an art fired by empathy and compassion."
— The New York Times

"Hersch’s work is cast in an idiom of almost unrelieved darkness, searing emotional intensity and godless desolation ... Yet the taut power and craft of Hersch’s driven, uncompromising music–spanning well over two hours with one merciful intermission—are undeniable ... On the Threshold of Winter is not for the faint of heart, and is a tough work to experience. But for all its hard edges and stark perspective, it is ultimately an intensely human and moving examination of mortality–providing as much of an unblinking gaze into the abyss as Mahler’s Ninth Symphony and Schubert’s Sonata in B flat."
— Chicago Classical Review

"... Hersch is so sincere in his darkness, and so sophisticated in his expressivity, that he can make the morbid magical."
— New York Magazine

"Michael Hersch is an extraordinary composer. His chamber opera titled On the Threshold of Winter, which recently was presented in an astonishing production by the NOVA Chamber Music Series, makes as huge demands on audience members as it does on the soprano and the chamber orchestra that accompanied her. In the intimate setting of the Studio Theatre at the Rose Wagner Center for Performing Arts, Hersch’s opera puts performers and audience members in a closed space of remarkable imagery and music that commands us to consider, remember and meditate on the experiences and inevitability of our mortality ... From the introduction, Hersch’s score throws down the gauntlet, challenging the performers in music that can be disjunctive, jagged, muscular, angular and then suddenly fragile in brief but prominent moments of lyricism before returning to an agitated state. But, all of this is embedded in Hersch’s impeccable conscience."
— The Utah Review

"Hersch, now in his second decade as one of the most prominent composers in the country, writes masterly modernist music of implacable seriousness. After personal tragedy - he not only battled cancer but watched a close friend die of the disease - he came to write his first opera, a monodrama for soprano employing texts from the final collection of the Romanian poet Marin Sorescu."
— The New Yorker

"... On the Threshold of Winter is a journey into fatal illness that, in Hersch's hands, acknowledges no distance, safe or otherwise, between a listener and the suffering protagonist. ... Yes, it's that dark - as Hersch tends to be, but in ways that are purely existential and without moral corruption. There are no bad personas in Hersch's works, only innocents confronting an overwhelming world."
— The Philadelphia Inquirer

"a masterpiece"
— Cotidianul