On the Threshold of Winter at BAM Fisher

Michael Hersch’s long-awaited first work for the stage receives its world premiere. Scored for soprano and an ensemble of eight, the two-act work follows the trajectory of Marin Sorescu’s wrenching last book, The Bridge. Suffering from the late stages of cancer, Sorescu wrote these poems in hospital during his life’s final weeks.

In the words of co-translator Adam J. Sorkin: “These poems … expressions of doubt, reluctant faith, protest … are a testament not just to human mortality and pain, but to resistance ... a creative transformation of the struggle to accept fate and in the same breath attempt to defy its imminent finality … I suspect though, that there is no way to be immune to the harrowing content, even if one tries. The volume progresses chronologically from the beginning of November 1996 onward. A mere five weeks. Most of the poems are dated, and the inexorable momentum of poem after poem toward Sorescu’s death seems to make the book something like a medieval tableau, a dance of death arranged as a procession of still living poems.”