Fred Hersch's "Leaves of Grass" concert previewed in Post story

Pianist and composer Fred Hersch (pictured) will be bringing his eight-piece Ensemble to the Sheldon Concert Hall next Saturday, February 10, to perform "Leaves of Grass," his original suite of music inspired by the poetry of Walt Whitman. This weekend's Post-Dispatch has a couple of stories by Calvin Wilson previewing the concert - an interview with Hersch and a sidebar about Whitman - and you can read them online here and here.

The "Leaves of Grass" suite has gotten a fair amount of media attention since Hersch first released the CD in 2005. For example, you can read reviews of the CD here and here, and a review of a 2005 live performance here. Around the same time, Keyboard magazine did a feature story on Hersch, and NPR did two segments after the release of the CD: a Morning Edition profile of Hersch and an interview of Hersch by Terry Gross for Fresh Air. For more, you can access an MP3 stream of Hersch and vocalist Kate McGarry performing part of the suite live on New York radio station WNYC here, and read a New York Times review of a recent Hersch trio performance at Lincoln Center here.

For more about Walt Whitman, the go-to online resource would seem to be the Whitman Archive, and if you're so inclined, you can even read the entire text of "Leaves of Grass" at Bartleby, an invaluable site that makes many public domain works of literature available online for free.