Michael Hersch - Images From A Closed Ward (CD)

Composer Michael Hersch's string quartet Images from a Closed Ward, performed here with absolute commitment by the New York based FLUX Quartet, is inextricably connected to his friendship with the late American artist Michael Mazur. More specifically, Hersch was inspired by a series of etchings and lithographs Mazur did of inmates in a Rhode Island mental asylum in the 1960's. In his musical depiction of these images, Hersch writes music that is at times aggressive and disturbing and at other times introspective and alienated, but always posseses profound intensity and deeply felt humanity.