Michael Hersch: Images from a Closed Ward
New Focus Recordings

Michael Hersch's Images from a Closed Ward is most assuredly uneasy listening, but not gratuitously so. By drawing inspiration from a series of unsparing etchings and lithographs the American artist Michael Mazur (1935-2009) created in the early ‘60s of inmates in a Rhode Island mental asylum, Hersch's sixty-five-minute string quartet is true to its disturbing subject matter. Performed by the New York-based FLUX Quartet (Tom Chiu, Conrad Harris, violins; Max Mandel, viola; Felix Fan, cello), the work is harrowing yet also infused with humanity. Never is the impression left that Mazur and Hersch are indulging in some perverse ironic exercise or exploiting their subjects for amusement's sake; instead, one comes away from the project convinced that both felt great compassion for human beings living in such dire circumstances and wished to honour them using their respective art forms.

Of Hersch's On the Threshold of Winter, The New York Times stated, “Death casts a long shadow over the recent work of Mr. Hersch,” words that are almost as applicable to Images from a Closed Ward but for the fact that the subjects preserved in Mazur's images aren't dead, though they may soon be so, judging by their woeful physical state. The seeds for the work were planted in 2000 when the composer was in Rome enjoying a residency as a Fellow at the American Academy and viewed an exhibit of etchings by Mazur based on Robert Pinsky's translation of Dante's Inferno. Recognizing a kindred sensibility, Hersch contacted the artist and a relationship developed that would eventually lead to the string quartet and this recording. In the booklet included with the release, Mazur's etchings are shown alongside equally powerful photographs by Gianni Berengo Gardin, Jerry Cooke, and others.

Hersch's sombre work is structured (and indexed) as thirteen movements yet plays without interruption, the shift from one to the next often signified by dramatic changes in volume, dynamics, and mood; its generally slow pace even drops as far as twenty-four beats per minute, a tempo at which any sense of pulse grows obscure. Whereas movements one and seven are ghostly chorales, their solemn fragility is countered by the aggressiveness of the quartet's attack elsewhere. Sonorities are often raw, especially when the sounds generated by the four appear as a homophonic mass, and the playing, even during its quieter episodes, inculcates feelings of dread and claustrophobia. Note clusters creak dissonantly, with the cello providing a skeletal plucked accompaniment for the brittle, dirge-like expressions of the others. Tension builds almost unbearably during quiet movements when one anticipates the merciless rupture to come, as illustrated by the transition from the hushed utterances of the third to the sour tonalities of the fourth. Offering a relative moment of levity, pizzicati flourishes in the brief eighth movement punctuate the gloom like sunlight flooding a darkened room. If any part could be seen as representative of the piece, it might be the brooding ninth, whose sustained tones effectively convey the “haunted; stricken” performance instruction. The eleventh, on the other hand, distills the work's ferocious side into a single movement, one where the strings engage in violent, stabbing counterpoint with relentless fervour.

April 2018