Review: In a Network commission, Hersch goes inward

Philadelphia composer Michael Hersch usually leaves you gasping - cognitively speaking - to keep up. Not that he wants to leave anybody behind. He provides explanations as detailed as any GPS for the long distances his pieces travel.

But in his new song cycle, a breath upwards, Hersch stopped me in my tracks as he explored a narrower-than-usual range of sound, harmony and gesture, requiring a more minute exploration of the tension between music and texts from Dante's Inferno and related ones by Ezra Pound. This piece went inward with fine gradations of awe, disbelief and contemplation of the incomprehensible.

Completing the experience, the Network for New Music concert on Sunday at the Curtis Institute's Gould Hall also offered an optional visit to the Print Center across Latimer Street for an exhibition of Michael Mazer's inferno-inspired engravings, which prompted Hersch to write the piece. Though Hersch's music and Mazer's soul-branding images share a kind of ghostly mystery, the composer's free-ranging intuition couldn't help but take him far from the source.

The 30-minute cycle for linear instruments (soprano, clarinet, horn and viola) has 12 sections, three of them instrumental interludes that gave soprano Ah Young Hong time to recover from highly concentrated music that often progresses between spare, well-chosen pitches and storms of notes.

Descriptive passages included the viola making a thin, wiry sound to go with Dante's line "So we had to go on the open edge. . . ." Later, "Then we emerged to see the stars again" had a gracefully descending vocal line. Is the difference between hell and Earth extremes of tension and repose?

Other moments, though, were so oblique as to be obscure. Silences sometimes broke up a poetic line. At times, music and words had no apparent relationship. Also, the many high-lying vocal passages rendered the words unintelligible, despite Hong's intelligent efforts to make it work with a white, low-vibrato tone. Hersch's uncompromising vision is what makes him fascinating. But voices must be met halfway.

Following Hersch isn't easy for any composer - emerging from his über-expressionistic world takes a while - so the program rightly continued with thoroughly different pieces, such as the solo-piano bagatelles by David Ludwig titled Three Portraits of Isabella (as in the Boston art collector Isabella Stewart Gardiner), full of nice moments but no heavy freight.

But Jan Krzywicki's Catching Light for winds, cello, and percussion complemented Hersch with an invitingly complex harmonic palette that might be described as liberated Stravinsky - much forward momentum and a clear though individualistic sense of beginning, middle and end. Titled "Flickering" "Shimmering" and "Burning," the three movements progressed into increasing rich density. As with Hersch, a world premiere commission by Network, and a beautifully crafted one.