One of the youngest composers ever to win the Guggenheim Fellowship in Music
(1997), Hersch, in the past three years, has also been awarded an Ives
Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, the American
Composers Award, the New York Youth Symphony's "First Music" prize,
a "Meet the Composer" grant and three ASCAP Foundation grants. In
1997, he was a fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center. In June 1998, he
attended the Norfolk Festival in Connecticut and accompanied Christopher
Rouse to the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan.
Next season, Hersch has been commissioned by the Brooklyn Philharmonic and
Robert Spano for a work that will receive its premiere in April 2001. The
Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center will present two new works including
the New York Premiere of his Solo Sonata for Violin and a piano piece, which
Hersch will perform at Merkin Concert Hall. Additionally, the St. Louis
Symphony and Merkin Concert Hall in New York will present chamber concerts
featuring his music. The Pittsburgh Symphony will perform the New York
premiere of Ashes of Memory at Carnegie Hall on March 21, 2001.
The 1998/1999 season included premieres of three orchestral works and two
chamber works. The New York Chamber Symphony performed the world premiere
of Recollections of Fear, Hope and Discontent. His second clarinet
trio was performed in Washington and New York and his music was heard in
Canada for the first time when On Sorrow, Anger and Reflection
received its world premiere at the CBC Vancouver Symphony. Marin Alsop and
the Colorado Symphony performed the world premiere of "..and I am
plunged into darkness," and Hersch's Piano Quartet received its
premiere at Weill Recital Hall, commissioned by the Ellen Taaffe Zwilich
Young Composers Workshop at Carnegie Hall.
Highlights of the past three seasons include the premiere of Hersch's work
Elegy for strings in 1997 at Lincoln Center. His Movement for
Orchestra, commissioned through the New York Youth Symphony's "First
Music" program, received its premiere in that same year at Carnegie
Hall. In 1998, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center performed his
first clarinet trio, and in August of that year the Cabrillo Festival
performed the world premiere of his Prelude and Fugue for orchestra,
conducted by Marin Alsop. Hersch's chamber music has also been performed at
the Tanglewood Music Festival, the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan,
the American Music Festival in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere in the United
States, as well as in Moscow.
Hersch was born in Washington, D.C. in 1971 and grew up in Reston, Virginia.
He studied composition at the Moscow Conservatory and received a Certificate
in Composition in 1995. In 1997, he completed his Masters Degree in
Composition at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore.
