Today’s Morning Edition featured a piece on jazz pianist and composer Fred Hersch, whose latest major work is a setting of poems from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Last spring I went to see him and his ensemble premiere it in D.C. It’s good stuff. Have a listen to the interview. (Other resources are also included on the linked page.) Hersch on “When I Heard at the Close of the Day”:
It’s really one of the great love poems. And when you think, too, just of the guts that it took to write that in 1860 about somebody of the same sex, that’s rather remarkable. As an… 18-year-old gay man, to read that was like “wow.”
His next D.C. appearance is at the Kennedy Center (Apr. 22-23). He’ll be performing Leaves of Grass occasionally throughout his tour, including Carnegie Hall next year. Good for him.