Cellist Andrew Power and Hornist Stephen Craigen take on a monstrous 2-hour duo work by American composer Michael Hersch. Instrumental virtuosity and physicality are pushed to their very limits.
Last Autumn (2008) is the second and shortest piece from Hersch’s cycle 'sew me into a shroud of leaves', which is based on poetry by WG Sebald, Christopher Middleton and Marius Kociejowski.
The work is structured into two books with a total of 41 movements, which range drastically from the violent and turbulent to lyrical and sombre, brought to life by the beautiful acoustic of Frederiksberg Kirke.
More information about Hersch and this work can be found on his website: https://michaelhersch.com/works/program/last-autumn.html
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Performers:
Stephen Craigen (French Horn) and Andrew Power (Cello)
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Programme:
Michael Hersch - Last Autumn
All poetical text by W. G. Sebald (1944−2001). Translation into English by Michael Hamburger.
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Book 1
1. The air stirs the light…
2. Spreading out above them is the branch work of a fig tree with fruit, one of which is entirely hollowed out by insects.
3. …in a different consistency of the air, whose deoxygenated void in the gasping breath of the figures…
4. A crow on the wing lost a white feather. The vicar, a limping messenger in a black coat, appeared on New Year’s morning alone on the wide snow-covered field.
5. Scherzo (A)
6. Intermezzo (A)
7. Lullaby I
8. Scherzo (B)
9. March
10. …a dress entangled in thistles…
11. Lullaby II
12. Psalm (A)
13. …with tiny lanterns they haunted the rubbish dumps…
14. …shade in the heat of noon, light in darkness, shelter from frost and rain, conveyance at the hour of weariness, help in extremity, so that under Thy guidance safely we may attain that place to which we are drawn; …so that the stars propitiously conjoin above us
15. In the end, awaiting recovery she is placed in a hospital where … Still she lives on, infirm in body and mind.
16. Intermezzo (B)
17. …the breaking of time from day to day and from hour to hour, it is rust and fire and the salt of the planets darkness even at noon and luminaries absent from heaven.
18. Intermezzo (C)
19. Lullaby III
20. Psalm (B)
21. …a dress entangled in thistles…
22. …while behind us already the green trees are leaving their leaves …The black bird that in its beak carries a break-time meal to St. Anthony on his site in the desert may be the one with the heart of glass, the bird flying ever closer to us… …the water boils itself out, …the earth trembles and the great city with the iron tower stands in flames, and darkness comes and with it a yellow dust that covers the land.
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Book 2
23. Lullaby I
24. Whoever closes the wings of the altar in the Lindenhardt parish church and locks up the carved figures in their casing on the lefthand panel will be met by St. George.
25. March
26. Fragment
27. … azure-blue, carmine-red and glaucous green, in their glow reflecting the cotton clouds, those white ones into which without a word the breath of legions of human beings has been absorbed.
28. Spreading out above them is the branch work of a fig tree with fruit, one of which is entirely hollowed out by insects.
29. On the Basel Crucifixion of 1505 behind the group of mourners a landscape reaches so far into the depth that our eyes cannot see its limits. A patch of brown scorched earth whose contour like the head of a whale or an open-mouthed leviathan devours the pale green meadow plains, and the marshily shining stretches of water. Above it, pushed off to behind the horizon, which step by step grows darker, more glowering, rise the hills of pre-history…
30. Lullaby IV
31. Scherzo (B)
32. Lullaby II
33. The air stirs the light…
34. Peer ahead sharply, there you see in the greying of nightfall the distant windmills turn. The forest recedes, truly, so far that one cannot tell where it once lay, and the ice-house opens, and rime, on to the field, traces a colourless image of Earth. So, when the optic nerve tears, in the still space of the air all turns as white as the snow on the Alps.
35. Intermezzo (D)
36. …under the rainbow arching over the land, the horsemen advance from their camp I know that the old coat is tearing and I am afraid of the ending of time.
37. A crow on the wing lost a white feather. The vicar, a limping messenger in a black coat, appeared on New Year’s morning alone on the wide snow-covered field.
38. …already the storm was hanging…
39. …in a different consistency of the air, whose deoxygenated void in the gasping breath of the figures…
40. …the eclipse of the sun, so will have become a witness to the secret sickening away of the world, in which a phantasmal encroachment of dusk in the midst of daytime like a fainting fit poured through the vault of the sky…
41. It was when darkness crept in and far below me I saw the roof of my house, saw the shadows falling …so soundlessly I glided, scarcely moving a wing, high above the earth…
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Ear Transplant are grateful to the following foundations for supporting this concert: Knud Højgaards Fond, Dansk Musiker Forbund, William Demant Fonden, Hoffman og Husmans Fond, Frederiksberg Fonden, Frederiksberg Kommune Musikudvalg, Aage og Johanne Louis-Hansens Fond, Beckett Fonden.