Paul Kosidowski | June 8, 2015

David Hertzberg’s Meditation Boreale for string quartet is true to its meteorological name, using harmonics and overtones to ethereal ends. After building to an intense climax, it ends with a plaintive viola solo, beautifully played here by Ritzenhaler.

The Intimacy of Creativity | April 26, 2015

Anthony Tommasini | February 18, 2015

This inaugural concert includes works of J.S. Bach, Zemlinsky, Korngold, and Golijov and features the much-anticipated world premiere of David Hertzberg's "Sunday Morning." Hailed as "opulently gifted" by Opera News, Hertzberg is among New York's youngest and most exciting new composers.

David Hertzberg's "Orgie-Céleste" for clarinet, violin and piano. In this riveting work, Mr. Hertzberg, 24, demonstrates that a gifted young composer can be inspired by masters and still speak with a vibrantly personal style. The music abounds in echoes of composers Mr. Hertzberg seems to have had in his ear, especially Messiaen, Schoenberg and Morton Feldman. Yet the sound and dogged exploration of the work's ideas come across as utterly original.

Music by Six Curtis Student Composers (played by the Dover Quartet)

The Dover Quartet performs six new works by Curtis student composers, all supervised by the members of eighth blackbird. They include: You Shattered My Deafness II by Rene Orth; Meditation by Andrew Hsu; Scherzo (“Ach Wie Fluchtig, Ach Wie Nichtig”) by T.J. Cole; Moro Lasso by Alyssa Weinberg; unusta III by Riho Esko Maimets and Méditation boréale by David Hertzberg.
The members of the Dover Quartet (all of whom are Curtis graduates): Joel Link, violin; Bryan A. Lee, violin; Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt, viola and Camden Shaw, cello.

February 23, 2016

This year’s season includes the world premiere of David Hertzberg's "Sunday Morning" on March 16 at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

February 23, 2016

The company will present the world premiere of David Hertzberg's Sunday Morning at Jazz at Lincoln Center's Appel Room in March. The following month, New York City Opera will stage the East Coast premiere of Hopper's Wife, which tells of an imagined marriage between the prickly artist Edward Hopper and L.A. Times gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. The opera, by composer Stewart Wallace and librettist Michael Korie, will be produced at the Harlem Stage.

Michael Huebner | February 1, 2016

David Hertzberg’s “Notturno Incantato,” a work commissioned for Lin, wafted in atmospheric quietude, then thick atonal flourishes. Elements of Ravel’s “Gaspard de la nuit” mixed with George Crumb’s “Makrokosmos” in an attractive build of ghostly harmony.

June 23, 2015

Opera Philadelphia, in collaboration with Gotham Chamber Opera and Music-Theatre Group in New York, is proud to announce that composer David Hertzberg, whose music "demonstrates that a gifted young composer can be inspired by masters and still speak with a vibrantly personal style" (the New York Times), has been selected as its fifth Composer in Residence (CIR). Hertzberg was chosen from over 150 applicants for the position and now has the opportunity to follow a personalized development track focused on the advancement of his skills as an operatic composer.

Like Opera Philadelphia (“Charlie Parker’s Yardbird”), he has picked up a project that was put in limbo by the demise of Gotham Chamber Opera: the world première of the young American composer David Hertzberg’s “Sunday Morning,” a setting of Wallace Stevens’s beloved poem, for soprano, strings, and harp. 

June 23, 2015

American Composers Orchestra (ACO) has awarded composer David Hertzberg its $15,000 Underwood emerging composer commission for a work that will be premiered by ACO in the 2016-2017 season. Chosen from seven finalists during ACO’s 2015 Underwood New Music Readings on May 6 and 7, 2015, David won the top prize with his work, Spectre of the Spheres.

Dayla Arabella Santurri | June 10, 2015

David Hertzberg’s ‘Spectre of the Spheres’ is a beautifully written work with startlingly crystalline textures. It evokes a musical work that is both familiar and mysterious. It has a grand sweep to it, and achingly beautiful melodies. 

May 26, 2015

It was valuable to hear David Hertzberg's strikingly original murmurations(2014). The Juilliard- and Curtis-trained composer establishes a soundscape in this longish piece that, in its harmonic language, grows out of non-serial Berg and Schoenberg but, in the ghostly way it reveals itself, resembled little else.

Robert Leeper

Of particular note was David Hertzberg’s Spectre of the Spheres. Inspired by the Wallace Steven poemThe Auroras of Autumn which uses the image of a thrashing serpent to represent the Northern Lights, the orchestra’s restless harmonies swirl around a chiming celesta, which is both at the center of and unattached to the sounds around it.

Anthony Tommasini | February 18, 2015

The next piece was a premiere: David Hertzberg’s “Orgie-Céleste” for clarinet, violin and piano. In this riveting work, Mr. Hertzberg, 24, demonstrates that a gifted young composer can be inspired by masters and still speak with a vibrantly personal style.

The music abounds in echoes of composers Mr. Hertzberg seems to have had in his ear, especially Messiaen, Schoenberg and Morton Feldman. Yet the sound and dogged exploration of the work’s ideas come across as utterly original. It opens with an episode in which the piano plays restless runs with hints of bird calls. The violin is consumed with cosmic harmonics, while the clarinet fixates on haunting two-note figures. The music goes through bursts of wildness, yet never loses its mystical aura. The eminent pianist Ursula Oppens, joined by the violinist Paul Huang and the clarinetist Narek Arutyunian, who were both featured in the Young Concert Artists gala concerto concert last year, gave an exhilarating performance.

Simon Chin | September 28, 2014

After intermission came the afternoon’s highlight: a new work by the talented young American composer David Hertzberg. “Notturno Incantato” is a 15-minute piece commissioned for Lin and premiered this year in New York. It is a darkly atmospheric work built on lithe undulations of sound punctuated by sharp moments of crisis. The piece’s mysterious tension was beautifully sustained in a supple and persuasive performance by Lin.

Maria Jean Sullivan | August 8, 2014

Mr. Hertzberg is deserving of the reward because the prize jury found his music to be "an extraordinarily beautiful sound world with a unique and distinguishing vocabulary," with "deeply affecting emotional content.” The jury adds that Mr. Hertzberg has the potential to revamp the world of concert repertoire for voice.

Here, you can hear his stunning “Nympharum,” a cantata for high soprano and orchestra after Ezra Pound.

Michael Cooper | August 3, 2014

The panel that chose Mr. Hertzberg found that his music offered “an extraordinarily beautiful sound world with a unique and distinguishing vocabulary.”

March 11, 2014

A new piece by the opulently gifted twenty-three-year-old David Hertzberg, the Young Concert Artists' Composer-in-Residence, used two Wallace Stevens poems as his text, and overflowed with a refreshingly explorative harmonic language that was an intriguing match for Stevens' dense, eloquent imagery. Bullock, for her part, sang as if in a state of unfolding amazement at the otherworldly musical and visual universe she herself was evoking. She sang this difficult but mesmerizing work from memory, as if it were a familiar repertory item, and pianist Renate Rohlfing showed similar mastery of the richly cascading, often cataclysmically dissonant accompaniment.

Anthony Tommasini | March 12, 2014

She then presented the premiere of “Ablutions of Oblivion,” written for her by David Hertzberg, this year’s Young Concert Artists composer in residence. The piece is a 15-minute, through-composed setting of two elusive yet compelling poems by Wallace Stevens: “Banal Sojourn” and “The Snow Man.” The music unfolds in mostly slow-moving vocal lines that emerge from a subdued piano part thick with cluster chords in the style of Messiaen. At one point during the “Banal Sojourn” setting, the mood intensifies and takes the singer into powerful outbursts in the high register, an extreme and terrifying passage.

Vivien Schweitzer | February 12, 2014

As part of the Concert Artists Guild’s commissioning program, which has produced almost 100 new works since 1984, Mr. Lin offered the premiere of the “Notturno Incantato” by David Hertzberg. Given a committed performance by Mr. Lin, the appealing piece at times evoked Scriabin and Debussy. Agitated, hard-driving passages were interspersed with a quiet interlude; texturally alluring sections featured rippling, delicate figurations that unfolded enigmatically in the upper register.

Zachary Woolfe | April 16, 2013

The ensemble finished its anniversary season on Friday evening at Alice Tully Hall with a concert dominated by American composers.

Best was Mr. Hertzberg’s “femminina, oscura,” inspired by country nights and titled after lines from Wallace Stevens:

Night, the female,

Obscure,

Fragrant and supple,

Conceals herself.

The work’s nightscape was calm yet eerie, starting with hushed chords punctuated by harp plucks. This led to a mournfully beautiful solo for the wonderful flutist Emi Ferguson that brought her from breathy bursts to lithe melodies. If scoring for both harmonium and celesta may have been a little much, they combined with shivers of strings to genuinely evocative effect.

April 1, 2011

The first composer, David Hertzberg, has spent all his life in music, including studies in Darmstadt. His Nympharum, from Ezra Pound’s line, Nympharum membra disjecta (The scattered limbs of the nymphs) has already garnered the prestigious Arthur Friedman Composition Prize, for good reason. The work for high soprano–taken unerringly by the familiar voice of Jennifer Zetlan–carried, in its three Pound poems, lines not unlike Lulu, reaching, soaring into the landscape against a loud but not intrusive orchestra. 

True, the three poems are aphoristic, almost haiku, and Mr. Hertzberg has clothed them in grandiose orchestral robes more fitting for an epic poem. But the lines were extravagantly good, the long epilogue to the tiny “Dawn Song” was lush and dreamy, the sounds themselves evoking auras.