Press - Thumbnails — David Hertzberg

RISING STAR: THE WEEK'S 8 BEST CLASSICAL MUSIC MOMENTS ON YOUTUBE

Anthony Tommasini | September 22, 2017

SUGGESTING CELESTA | One of the three (yes, three!) world premieres at Opera Philadelphia’s O17 festival is David Hertzberg’s “The Wake World,” a fantastical tale presented in a spacious court at the Barnes Foundation. Mr. Herzberg’s spiky, sumptuous opera reminded me of his chamber piece “Orgie-Céleste,” which I heard performed in 2015 on a Young Concert Artists program. In this score I hear echoes of Messaien, Schoenberg and Feldman, though the compositional voice is personal and quirky, at once mystical and wild. At times, true to its title, it suggests strange, tinkling celesta sounds. Catch the passage when the clarinetist, violinist and pianist seem to get swept up in their own spheres, but just calmly keep on.

PHILLY'S FIRST EVER 017 OPERA FEST WINS NEW FANS, NATIONAL ACCLAIM

David Patrick Stearns | September 21, 2017

Composer David Hertzberg’s music in The Wake World inspired some of the best critical writing of the festival. Waleson: “The sheen and muscle of Strauss wedded to the diaphanous spirit of Debussy.” Tommasini: “The score, spiked with modernist elements, makes Mr. Hertzberg seem like a 21st-century Ravel.” Dobrin: “A half-remembered dream Szymanowski once had about Scriabin.”

5 OPERAS IN 72 HOURS: A PHILADELPHIA FESTIVAL IS A TEST OF SURVIVAL

Anthony Tommasini | September 20, 2017

[ ... ] Just five instrumentalists produce wondrous colors and sonorities. The score, spiked with modernist elements, makes Mr. Hertzberg seem a 21st-century Ravel. The choral writing is eerily voluptuous. The performers, directed by R. B. Schlather, often walked amid attendees, who sat, stood and milled about. (Talk about engaging your audience.)

AN OPERA FEST TO BINGE ON

Heidi Waleson | September 19, 2017

[ ... ] Mr. Hertzberg’s music, conducted by Elizabeth Braden, has an early 20th-century aura, with the sheen and muscle of Strauss wedded to the diaphanous spirit of Debussy, but with a distinctly modern edge. His variety makes the orchestra of five sound like many more instruments, while the chorus of 16 creates a mystical underpinning for the arresting principal singers, soprano Maeve Höglund (Lola) and mezzo Rihab Chaieb (Fairy Prince).

O17 HITS THE BARNES WITH A HALLUCINATORY FAIRY TALE

Peter Dobrin | September 19, 2017

[ ... ] The Wake World, by David Hertzberg, is music to draw up around you like velvet — or, to borrow from Hertzberg’s own libretto, “such soft violet glistens like this place.” The prose was purple, and so was the music, so thoroughly an antique musical language that it sounded like a half-remembered dream Szymanowski once had about Scriabin. A lesson in music theory isn’t necessary here, but suffice it to say that Hertzberg, with degrees from both Juilliard and Curtis, recognizes the mystical qualities of a harmonic world that constantly resists resolution. It floats.

BWW INTERVIEW: BARNES-STORMING IN THE WAKE WORLD OF COMPOSER DAVID HERTZBERG

Richard Sasanow | September 15, 2017

The last of the new operas at the center of Opera Philadelphia's O17 opera fest is THE WAKE WORLD, a chamber piece written by composer/librettist David Hertzberg and directed by RB Schlather. It opens on Monday September 18 at the Barnes collection in central Philadelphia and promises a one-of-a-kind experience for those savvy enough to snare a ticket. Its five performances are sold out.

BERNSTEIN'S 100TH, PHILLY'S OWN OPERA FEST, AND 16 MORE TOP PICKS IN CLASSICAL MUSIC

Peter Dobrin | September 6, 2017

Musically, I’m most intrigued by The Wake World, David Hertzberg’s one-act opera inspired by works in the Barnes Foundation (and performed there) and by British polymath Aleister Crowley (poet, occultist, mountaineer). Hertzberg’s musical language, to judge by past works, is atmospheric and highly sensitive to color — not bad qualities given the subject matter.

DAVID HERTZBERG'S THE WAKE WORLD: "A STRANGE AND SEXY SYNERGY."

August 10, 2017

On the exciting line-up for this year's O17 Festival is the world premiere of Opera Philadelphia 's Composer in Residence David Hertzberg's The Wake World, September 18-25. With director R.B. Schlather, Hertzberg's work is designed to give audiences a one-of-a-kind experience of the galleries of The Barnes Foundation, focusing on the fascinating lives of Dr. Albert C. Barnes (1872-1951) and Aleister Crowley (1875-1947).

Hertzberg spoke with us about his unique new work, and the "beyond rad" experience of writing an opera to feature the Opera Philadelphia Chorus.

FALL PREVIEW: NEW OPERAS AND IMPORTANT REVIVALS ACROSS AMERICA

August 9, 2017

Opera Philadelphia’s much-anticipated new festival includes an astonishing three world premieres and a Philadelphia premiere. [...] The Wake World, with music and libretto by David Hertzberg, is inspired by an Aleister Crowley story and the highly personal art collection amassed by Albert C. Barnes in Philadelphia. The opera will take place in the Barnes Museum.

ARTISTIC JOURNEY

August 2017

David Hertzberg’s Wake World unfolds at Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation.

REVIEW: HEAR NOW FESTIVAL IS ALL ABOUT L.A. COMPOSERS

M ay 8, 2017

At 27, David Hertzberg is one of the youngest composers at the festival. His “Méditation Boréale,” performed by the Lyris String Quartet, also on the April 29 program, unfolds in an uninterrupted 15-minute arc. “I wrote it on a trip to Sweden,” Hertzberg said. “It has an arctic flavor, conjuring a magical northern landscape.”

The composer added that the score is melodic and “sounds like Gregorian chant from another planet.”

Hertzberg currently is working on “The Wake World,” an opera that grew out of his thinking about the mystical and religious symbols in kabbalah. Commissioned by Opera Philadelphia, it opens in September.

REVIEW: WHAT TO HEAR THE REAL LA LA LAND? LEND AN EAR TO THE L.A. COMPOSERS OF THE HEAR NOW FESTIVAL

M ay 1, 2017

The Lyris, the latest in a string of great L.A. quartets, filled every square inch of First Lutheran with rapturous sonorities in David Hertzberg’s “Méditation Boréale”.

REVIEW: AN AMERICAN COMPOSERS ORCHESTRA PAYS A BRACING TRIBUTE

March 26, 2017

Speaking with Mr. Yim onstage before the premiere of his alluring Chamber Symphony, Mr. Hertzberg said that this single-movement work presents a series of contrasting ideas, almost as if different composers were talking to one another across vistas. The piece begins with seemingly distinct statements, with pauses in between: a mini-episode of pastoral-like sonorities with an ominous cello line lurking below; sustained, bustling high harmonies with squiggly flights from the piano; an episode of staggered drum bursts; a haze of dense, piercingly dissonant chords; and more. Over time the music tries to find commonalities among the contrasts, building to an ecstatic, slightly crazed culmination that sounded like modern-day Messiaen.

PAST FORWARD: COMPOSER SPOTLIGHT - DAVID HERTZBERG

American Chamber Orchestra | February 22, 2017

David Hertzberg is currently Composer-in-Residence with Opera Philadelphia and Music Theatre Group and has been honored with the Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two ASCAP Morton Gould Awards, the Fromm Commission from Harvard University, and the Aaron Copland Award from Copland House. Past residencies include Tanglewood, Yaddo, IC Hong Kong, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, and Young Concert Artists.

David's Spectre of the Spheres was selected for our 2015 Underwood New Music Readings, where it earned him the $15,000 Underwood Commission to write a new orchestral work. David's Chamber Symphony is this new work, and will be premiered by Maestro George Manahan and the American Composers Orchestra at “Past Forward” on Friday, March 24, 2017 at 7:30pm in Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall . David was kind enough to talk with us about the piece.

KANSAS CITY SYMPHONY RELISHES HUMOR IN BEETHOVEN, PASSION OF PROKOFIEV

Libby Hanssen | February 18, 2017

David Hertzberg was on hand to preface his “for none shall gaze upon the Father and live,” written in 2015, the young composer describing his intent behind the work’s mystical soundworld. Beginning with a fragile effect of air blown through the brass and rasping of near-silent strings, the seismic pulse developed from long, layered, decaying tones. Wide intervallic leaps, a two-note theme, were revealed from this atmosphere, which relied on a series of swell-and-release moments to proceed with the push of its expanding crescendo. At the final strike, Stern suspended the cut off to allow the work’s visceral effect on the audience to dissipate.

REVIEW: ‘MASON BATES’ KC JUKEBOX: RAVISHMENT’ AT THE KENNEDY CENTER

Ana Morgenstern | J anuary 3 1, 2017

The next piece in the program was a short but wonderfully beautiful piece by Los Angeles-based composer David Hertzberg titled Ellébore, composed for a septet. Hertzberg also came to us in black and white video format to explain his inspiration for the piece, which was a blooming flower in the winter. Indeed, this was a delicate piece that was definitely edgy but kept a balance through strings that reminded me of melting snow and the slow moving water accumulating in a field getting ready for spring.

MICHAEL STERN DISCUSSES DAVID HERTZBERG'S WORK

Michael Stern | February 14, 2017

OUT ON THE TOWN TOWN: D.C. AREA ENTERTAINMENT PICKS, FOR THE WEEK OF Jan. 26, 2017

Doug Rule | January 26, 2017

Mason Bates, the Kennedy Center Composer-in-Residence, continues his reinvention of the classical music concert experience. Named after one of two works to be performed by composer and vocalist Lisa Bielawa, Ravishment will be conducted by Fawzi Haimor and anchored by a performance of The Second Quartet by John Adams in celebration of the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer’s 70th birthday. Also on the bill is Carrot Revolution, a work by one of Adams’ students, Gabriella Smith, plus an eerie electronica piece by Chris Cerrone and a dreamy whimsical work by David Hertzberg. All set within a warehouse-type top floor space, the concert is followed by a dance party featuring DJ Moose.

30 UNDER 30: THE REMARKABLE YOUNG PEOPLE CHANGING THE L.A. JEWISH COMMUNITY

Eitan Arom | J anuary 26, 2017

The son of San Fernando Valley State Sen. Bob Hertzberg is composer-in-residence for Opera Philadelphia and Music-Theatre Group. [David] Hertzberg has two degrees from Juilliard (where he studied under the tutelage of Jewish composer Sam Adler) and has been described as a “gifted young composer … with a vibrantly personal style” by The New York Times. His music has been performed at Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center and Carnegie Hall, and by the likes of the New York City Opera, the Kansas City Symphony and the Pittsburgh Symphony.

MYSTICISM AND INSTINCT: SPOTLIGHT ON COMPOSER DAVID HERTZBERG

October 19, 2016

David Hertzberg is a Jewish American composer, currently living in Los Angeles, the city in which he was raised. He started playing music around age eight, studying violin, cello, and piano, and began composing soon thereafter with a love of Mozart and a deep feeling of kinship for classical music. Hertzberg reflects: “Composing was for me an immediately natural way of relating to music… I was fairly serious about piano for a while, but it was always second to composition.”

CLASSICAL MUSIC TO COME: A FINNISH STAR, MINIMALISM, AND WAGNER

Zachary Woolfe | September 16, 2016

AMERICAN COMPOSERS ORCHESTRA The young composer David Hertzberg impressed last year with “Sunday Morning,” an unusually unshowy, memorably delicate cantata for New York City Opera. This indefatigable new-music band gives the premiere of his new symphony at Carnegie Hall [...] March 24.

REVIEW: RESONANT BODIES FESTIVAL BLENDS FREEDOM WITH RADIANCE

Zachary Woolfe | September 11, 2016

Harking back to the suave songs of Lee Hoiby and Ned Rorem, David Hertzberg’s “Ablutions of Oblivion” sews together two Stevens poems with mellow lines for the singer and exuberant drizzles of piano (Milena Gligic).

RESONANT BODIES FESTIVAL SHOWCASES CONTEMPORARY VOCAL MUSIC

Zachary Woolfe | August 31, 2016

Among the highlights are the soprano Julia Bullock (fresh from her new evening of Josephine Baker arrangements at Lincoln Center), with works by Lukas Foss; John Cage; and the young, talented David Hertzberg.

GOINGS ABOUT TOWN: CLASSICAL MUSIC

The opening-night concert features performances by a true original, the young American soprano Julia Bullock (singing music by David Hertzberg in addition to classics by Foss and Cage); by the Australian flutist, soprano, and multimedia experimentalist Alice Teyssier; and by the Swedish composer and vocal improvisor Sofia Jernberg.

NEW ENGLAND PHILHARMONIC CLOSES SEASON WITH TWO PREMIERES

Aaron Keebaugh | May 1, 2016

The concert opened with the Boston premiere of [David] Hertzberg’s Spectre of the Spheres.

Hertzberg’s star is currently on the rise with his music being performed on elite stages such as Tanglewood, Lincoln Center, The Kennedy Center, and Carnegie Hall. Spectre of the Spheres, winner of the NEP’s annual Call for Scores competition, is a musical depiction of the aurora borealis as told through a poem by Wallace Stevens.

Hertzberg’s score, which clocks in at just over ten minutes, is wonderfully colorful and an evocative depiction of a striking natural phenomenon.

The music develops glacially, unfolding from a veil of harmonics and wind flutters that shimmer in space like the northern lights themselves. As the piece progresses, dense clouds of descending passages and stark string and wind statements form, carrying the piece to a sudden conclusion.

Pittman led the orchestra in a reading of bold commitment to give the piece a powerful performance.

REVIEW: AT 20, IN MO YANG MAKES HIS NEW YORK RECITAL DEBUT

Anthony Tommasini | April 27, 2016

He then gave the premiere performance of David Hertzberg’s “Daphne Unbound,” a 10-minute work for solo violin commissioned (by Concert Artists Guild in conjunction with the BMI Foundation) for Mr. Yang’s debut. Mr. Hertzberg, a young composer on the rise who has had several premieres in New York of late, wrote in a program note that this piece was inspired by myths and fairy tales of “natural transfiguration.” It begins mysteriously, as the violin plays cosmic-sounding harmonics that float high and low, like spectral arpeggios. Soon, tones swell and lines coalesce into a searching soliloquy. The piece gradually becomes agitated, though somehow this shift seems the expression of intensity that had been stirring from the start. Mr. Yang played with rhapsodic allure and wondrous colors.

SYMPHONY PRESENTS ‘FIVE ON FIRE’

Traci Rosenbaum | April 5, 2016

Living composer David Hertzberg wrote “Méditation boréale” a commission for the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. In a recent news release, Cascade Quartet violist Maria Ritzenthaler explained that “Hertzberg uses extreme registers and unique timbres to create a shimmering and ethereal sound world for the string quartet.”

Although young, Hertzberg is a rising star as a composer, and his works have been performed at several major music festivals and on the stages of Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, and Carnegie Hall.

REVIEW: NEW YORK CITY OPERA, A QUIET 'SUNDAY MORNING'

Zachary Woolfe | March 18, 2016

“Sunday Morning,” a work for soprano and small ensemble by the young composer David Hertzberg, was originally commissioned by Gotham Chamber Opera. But when that company foundered last year before a planned performance could take place, the piece wasscooped up by New York City Opera, which was rising from the ashes of bankruptcy at just the same time.

Mr. Hertzberg, who may well have doubted the fate of “Sunday Morning,” got to hear its belated premiere on Wednesday evening in the Appel Room at Jazz at Lincoln Center, where it was the final work on — and by far the highlight of — the new City Opera’s first concert program.

“Sunday Morning” is, above all, unusual. Attend any new-music concert, and you hear works by composers in their 20s and 30s that may be good or bad but are almost always restless and frenetic, full of dramatic contrasts. Think Pollock, or Basquiat.

Mr. Hertzberg here bears more resemblance to Robert Ryman: pale and unshowy, with flickers of color evident only on close inspection. “Sunday Morning,” a setting of an eight-part Wallace Stevens poem, begins with sunrise ethereality — held high notes in the strings and light plucks of a harp — and remains raptly restrained even as it condenses and blooms.

The music is gently perfumed and unhurried — perhaps, at 40 nearly stationary minutes, to a fault. But the work’s long, quiet duration does make drama out of even slight shifts: a dark cello line that gives spine to a reflection on death, or the elusive harmonies in the penultimate section, just as glassily shimmering as earlier but now more velvety.

PIANIST STEVEN LIN PAINTS COLORFUL SCHUMANN AND RAVEL WITH A BROAD KEYBOARD

Truman C. Wang | March 18, 2016

David Hertzberg’s new work “Notturno incantato” received an extraordinarily colorful and scintillating reading from Mr. Lin, its dedicatee. For the final showstopper “La Valse”, Mr. Lin seemed overly preoccupied with Ravel’s difficult transcription for the piano, which to his credit he played faultlessly, but showed little feeling for the romantic waltz. ... Also, more music from the very talented Mr. Hertzberg, please.

MUSIC REVIEW: NEW MUSIC IN TOWN FROM ENSEMBLE SRQ

Richard Storm | March 9, 2016

After an informative and informal introduction by the artistic directors, we heard a compelling reason for the creation of this initiative: David Hertzberg's "Meditation Boréale" – a depiction of the celestial forces which drive our universe, of the light and space in which we live, performed by Samantha Bennett and Micah Brightwell, violins; Steve Laraia, viola, and Jesse Christeson, cello.

At once tonally rich and mysterious, the music – often at the edge of audibility — was at times tragically lyrical, employing familiar harmonic devices to wrap us in the wider universe, especially in Bennett's extended and soaring solo passages.

REVIVED NEW YORK CITY OPERA ANNOUNCES MAJOR PREMIERES

Robert Viagas | February 23, 2016

New York City Opera announced that it will present “three major premieres,” including the world premiere of Sunday Morning by David Hertzberg on March 16, the New York City professional premiere of Daniel Catán’s Florencia en el Amazonas June 22-26, and the East Coast premiere of Stewart Wallace and Michael Korie’s Hopper’s Wife April 28-May 1.

REBOOTED NEW YORK CITY OPERA PLANS THREE PREMIERES

Jennifer Smith | February 22, 2016

NYCO will present a concert on March 16 at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Appel Room that includes the world premiere of “Sunday Morning,” a work by David Hertzberg set to the Wallace Stevens poem of the same name.

NEW YORK CITY OPERA UNVEILS REST OF SEASON

Michael Cooper | February 22, 2016

And on March 16 it will inaugurate a new concert series at the Appel Room in Jazz at Lincoln Center with the premiere of David Hertzberg’s “Sunday Morning,” initially set to be performed by Gotham Chamber Opera, which closed last year.

CHAMBER MUSIC BY CURTIS STUDENT COMPOSERS

October 18, 2015

Chamber music by Curtis student composers. Their program includes Andrew Hsu: Violin Sonata; T. J. Cole: "Drifter;" and David Hertzberg: "notturno incantato."