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. Composer Georg Friedrich Haas has written that Hersch “is the explorer of an unconditional, radical expressivity that reveals the human abyss without any palliation.” Recent events and premieres include his Violin Concerto at the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland and with Ensemble intercontemporain in Paris; productions of his two-act monodrama, On the Threshold of Winter in New York, Chicago, Salt Lake City, and Washington D.C., his elegy I hope we get a chance to visit soon at the Ojai and Aldeburgh Festivals, and his 10-hour chamber cycle, sew me into a shroud of leaves at the Wien Modern Festival. Recent opera premieres include Poppaea in a co-production of the ZeitRäume Basel and Wien Modern Festivals, Medea with Sarah Maria Sun, Schola Heidelberg and Ensemble Musikfabrik, and and we, each, produced by Mind on Fire in New York and Washington D.C.

Michael Hersch is the recipient of a Rome Prize, Berlin Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship in Composition, and the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship and Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, amongst others. In 2017, Hersch received the President’s Frontier Award, the Johns Hopkins University’s most prestigious internal honor.