Across … in grief and detail presents Michael Hersch at his most concentrated and exposed. Composed between two shattering personal crises, these three compact works push his already uncompromising idiom into a realm where every sound feels physically paid for. Writing for soprano, violin and bassoon in shifting combinations, Hersch strips away any sense of orchestral distance; what remains is a chamber theatre of proximity, in which the smallest inflection of the voice, the slightest change in bow pressure, the rasp of reed and breath all carry the weight of catastrophe and its aftermath.
The pieces draw on a web of textual and musical echoes – fragments and resonances from Christopher Middleton and Anja Utler, from Sweelinck and Schumann – but never settle into direct quotation or straightforward song. Instead, words appear like shards: sometimes sung full‑voiced, sometimes half‑whispered or caught on the edge of a scream, sometimes eroded to pure phoneme. Around them, violin and bassoon trace jagged contours and fragile, hovering lines, veering from barely audible harmonics and key clicks to violent, guttural eruptions. Dissonance is not treated as an effect but as a physiological reality; intervals grind together like joints under stress, while silences open up like gaps in memory or consciousness.
Across the programme, Hersch keeps the music pressed against the limits of what the performers – and by extension the listener – can bear. Phrases are cut off mid‑breath, textures fray as if collapsing under their own tension, yet the overall architecture is lucid, almost obsessively detailed. You hear the composer’s ear for micro‑gesture in the way a single repeated note is coloured ten different ways, in the way a whispered consonant triggers a sudden shift in harmony or register. This is not music that seeks consolation, nor does it aestheticise suffering; it insists on staring directly into the darker corners of experience, while honouring the bodies and voices that must carry that gaze.
Recorded with an intimacy that preserves every grain of sound‑making, across … in grief and detail stands as one of Hersch’s starkest and most revealing statements. It offers no easy catharsis, but it does offer a rare, bracing honesty: a portrait of an artist tracing, in real time, the edges of illness, loss and endurance, and allowing us to hear how those pressures etch themselves into the smallest, most fragile details of musical speech.
