And though the music is as deeply troubled as can be, its restless directness also commands listeners not to be paralyzed by existential futility.” Stearns also praised Hersch's playing, writing that the composer "conjured volcanic gestures from the piano with astonishing virtuosity." Overtly or covertly, The Vanishing Pavilions is about the destruction of shelter (both in fact and in concept) and life amid the absence any certainty. David Patrick Stearns of The Philadelphia Inquirer described the event as one that “felt downright historic.” He added, “The long-term trajectory of The Vanishing Pavilions is from music of polarized extremes to something more integrated, but harshly mirroring how elements of daily life that were unacceptable before Sept.
Hersch performed the vast, intricately detailed score entirely from memory. The Vanishing Pavilions was premiered by the composer on Octoat Saint Mark’s Church in Philadelphia. It is yet another technical challenge in a work that already requires extreme digital dexterity and strength. And the density does not merely extend horizontally, from movement to movement, but is often expressed vertically, too, in elaborate layers of distinctly articulated musical ideas and characters. A dense web of motivic, harmonic and atmospheric relationships binds the whole together.
Approximately half of the movements were composed as companions to Middleton's poetic images these are separated by a comparable number of intermezzi unrelated to any particular text.
Each book has its own discernible dramatic logic and shape, yet the two are indivisible. The Vanishing Pavilions is divided into two books that encompass some fifty movements. Yet with a score of some three hundred pages and a performance time of well over two hours, the latter work is on a far larger scale. Hersch has called his Czeslaw Milosz-inspired set of pieces for violin and piano, the wreckage of flowers (2003), “a shattered song cycle without words” and that vivid description also fits The Vanishing Pavilions. This was in the fall of 2001 at the American Academy in Berlin, where Hersch and Middleton were fellows within a year he had settled upon the various lines of poetry that would serve as inspiration and signposts for The Vanishing Pavilions. Thus, after reading Christopher Middleton’s poetry and feeling an immediate artistic and spiritual kinship with the British writer’s work, the idea for a massive solo-piano cycle began to take shape. With few exceptions, though, his musical responses tend to be expressed not in song but in purely instrumental terms. Like many composers before him, Michael Hersch finds inspiration in poetry.
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