Michael Hersch's wrenching fourth opera, and we, each, with a libretto after the poetry of Shane McCrae, is an exploration of the treacherous territories of relationships—between individuals, within societies and, ultimately, the collapse of both.
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"and we, each" a new opera by Michael Hersch after poetry of Shane McCrae [NY Premiere]
with Ah Young Hong and Jesse Blumberg
Conducted by Tito Muñoz
Directed by James Matthew Daniel
Produced by Mind on Fire
with Emi Ferguson (flute), Glen Kanasevich (bass clarinet), Adda Kridler (violin), Leah Asher (viola), and Coleman Itzkoff (cello)
A composer of “uncompromising brilliance” (The Washington Post) whose work has been described by The New York Times as “viscerally gripping and emotionally transformative music ... claustrophobic and exhilarating at once, with moments of sublime beauty nestled inside thickets of dark virtuosity,” Michael Hersch is widely considered among the most gifted composers of his generation. Recent events and premieres include his Violin Concerto with Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Ensemble intercontemporain in Paris, and the Lucerne Festival; productions of his monodrama, On the Threshold of Winter in Chicago, Salt Lake City, and Washington D.C., and his elegy I hope we get a chance to visit soon at the Ojai and Aldeburgh Festivals, where Mr. Hersch was a featured composer. Other recent premieres include his 10-hour chamber cycle, sew me into a shroud of leaves, a work which occupied the composer for fifteen years, at the 2019 Wien Modern Festival and National Sawdust in 2023. In 2021, the composer’s opera, Poppaea, premiered in Vienna and Basel in a co-production with ZeitRäume Basel and Wien Modern. The opera was a nominee for the 2023 Austrian Music Theater Prize for Best Contemporary Music Theater. Recent projects included one step to the next, worlds ending for Ensemble Phoenix Basel and his opera MEDEA for Sarah Maria Sun, Schola Heidelberg and Ensemble Musikfabrik. Notable past performances include Night Pieces, commissioned and premiered by the Cleveland Orchestra, and a song cycle for baritone and piano, Domicilium, commissioned and premiered by Thomas Hampson. Mr. Hersch’s end stages was commissioned and premiered by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. His A Forest of Attics, commissioned for the Network for New Music’s 25th anniversary season, was selected as one of the year’s most important classical music events by The Philadelphia Inquirer. The paper wrote of the work, “A Forest of Attics threw a Molotov cocktail into the concert: Everything before it paled in comparison ... Hersch has written some towering works in recent years; this is yet another.”
Poet Shane McCrae grew up in Texas and California. The first in his family to graduate from college, McCrae earned a BA at Linfield College, an MA at the University of Iowa, an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a JD at Harvard Law School. McCrae is the author of several poetry collections, including Mule (2011); Blood (2013); The Animal Too Big to Kill (2015); In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; and The Gilded Auction Block (2019). His work has also been featured in The Best American Poetry 2010, edited by Amy Gerstler, and his honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. McCrae’s attention to both meter and its breakage in his poems emphasizes the chafe of historical accounting against contemporary slippage, engaging this country’s troubling history and continuation of oppression and violence. In a 2013 conversation with Danniel Schoonebeek for PEN America, McCrae stated, “For me, writing into history is a way to grapple with the terrifying certainty of the present. That is, the more one studies and writes with history, the more often one discovers that apparently large and important human developments—a lot of things most people would call ‘progress’—are superficial.” In a 2014 review, Michael Klein observed, “Blood is as radical in structure as it is in the unbridled wildness of its emotional center. Lines descend on the page in varying lengths usually culminating into a single stanza and often broken or interrupted by a caesura or sutured with a slash—a blade, appropriately—or, as I came to think of the slash: a mark in the account where the tape got spliced. It’s a powerful visual effect— where the content is so married to its delivery—and approaches—strange and as hallucinatory as it can be—the dignity of oration. These are poems that are unrelenting and immediate—never delicate and never gentle.” His most recent book, a memoir, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun, was released to acclaim in 2023.
A “transfixing” (New Yorker) soprano of “fearlessness and consummate artistry” (Opera News), Ah Young Hong has interpreted a vast array of repertoire, ranging from the music of Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart, and Poulenc, to works of Shostakovich, Babbitt, Kurtág, and Haas. In Michael Hersch’s monodrama On the Threshold of Winter, The New York Times praised Ms. Hong as “the opera’s blazing, lone star,” The Chicago Tribune called her “absolutely riveting,” and the Kronen Zeitung wrote “her stage presence, her soprano voice ... Breathtaking.” In high demand as a concert and chamber soloist, Ms. Hong has performed with violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Ensemble Phoenix Basel, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Camerata Bern, Talea Ensemble, Mahler Chamber Orchestra, FLUX Quartet, Ensemble Klang, Ensemble unitedberlin, Ensemble Dal Niente, The Daedalus Quartet, Wiener KammerOrchester, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Charleston Symphony Orchestra, Phoenix Symphony Orchestra, Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, and Tempesta di Mare, amongst others. She has also appeared as soloist at the Aldeburgh Music Festival, CalPerformances series, Seattle Symphony recital series, and the Ojai Festival, amongst many others.
Baritone Jesse Blumberg enjoys a busy schedule of opera, concerts, and recitals, performing repertoire from the Renaissance and Baroque to the 20th and 21st centuries. He has performed featured roles at Minnesota Opera, Boston Lyric Opera, Atlanta Opera, Pittsburgh Opera, Boston Early Music Festival, Opera Atelier, and at Château de Versailles Spectacles and London’s Royal Festival Hall. Mr. Blumberg has sung major concert works with Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, American Bach Soloists, Boston Baroque, Carmel Bach Festival, Apollo’s Fire, Oratorio Society of New York, The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and on Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series. He has been increasingly active on concert stages in Canada for the last several years, appearing with the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, Symphony Nova Scotia, Early Music Vancouver, Arion Baroque, Grand Philharmonic Choir, and at the Montréal Baroque Festival. He has participated in many world premieres of recent American operas and song cycles, and works closely with renowned composers as a member of the Mirror Visions Ensemble.
Conductor Tito Muñoz recently completed an acclaimed ten-year tenure as Music Director of the Phoenix Symphony and has previously served as Music Director of the Opéra National de Lorraine in France. Other prior appointments include Assistant Conductor positions with the Cleveland Orchestra, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra and the Aspen Music Festival. Tito has appeared with many of North America’s most prominent orchestras, including Atlanta, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, New York and Utah. He maintains a strong international conducting presence, including engagements with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony, SWR Symphonieorchester, Deutsche Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken, Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Lausanne Chamber Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Scottish Symphony, Ulster Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic (London), Luxembourg Philharmonic, Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra, Opéra Orchestre National Montpellier, Opéra de Rennes, Auckland Philharmonia, Sydney Symphony and Sao Paolo State Symphony. He made his professional conducting debut in 2006 with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center and made his Cleveland Orchestra debut at the Blossom Music Festival that same year.
Director James Matthew Daniel is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of stage and screen. Directing projects include: AGATHA with Camerata Bern, Michael Hersch’s On the Threshold of Winter at the Peabody Institute and the Blair School of Music, Romance of a Lifetime as part of the Park Avenue Armory under-construction series. Cinematography projects include: The Manchurian Candidate at Minnesota Opera, Kevin Newbury’s Epiphany V and STAG, and recent videos for the Up Until Now Collective. James was recently the Video Director for Global Citizen, and has worked on past productions for Opera Philadelphia, Santa Fe Opera, The Prototype Festival, and Florida Grand Opera. James’s music videos include work for: Armor for Sleep, Sullivan, Lux Rd, Morgan James, Yanni Burton, Una Lux, and more.
This is James’s fourth collaboration with Michael Hersch. Mr. Daniel notes that he’s “honored to get to premiere a new work with the incredible group of creatives that have contributed to this project. Many voices are singing in and we, each, listen for them all.”
Mind on Fire makes music by living composers and showcases the talents of performing artists, building creative access and collaborative partnerships in Baltimore.
Mind on Fire was founded in 2017 by a small contingent of classical and experimental musicians with a goal to bring new, contemporary classical music back to Baltimore. Mind on Fire takes notated music out of the conservatory and puts it into dialogue with the incredible, radical art ecology of the city. By pairing new classical work with local experimental artists (musicians, poets, dancers, filmmakers, and visual artists), it is our intention to engender a sense of community and camaraderie between a diverse group of art makers and the audiences who follow them.
In the following eight years of operation, we have produced 50 concerts featuring 125 separate performances presented to over 4,500 attendees. When institutional and independent artists work together, the commerce of ideas is often dynamic and surprising. What happens when disparate resources, sensibilities, and expertises are shared in the pursuit of art making? Mind on Fire seeks to answer that question by presenting exceptionally compelling art performances by people of all disciplines and skill levels.