[6] In 2015, Hertzberg's chamber work Orgie-Céleste[7] was premiered at Merkin Hall in New York, as part of his tenure as Composer-in-Residence at Young Concert Artists.
[23] In June 2018, his chamber opera The Rose Elf, based on the fairy tale of the same name by Hans Christian Andersen, premiered in the catacombs of Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.
Writing in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Peter Dobrin described Hertzberg's saxophone quartet murmurations as "strikingly original", noting that the work's harmonic language "grows out of non-serial Berg and Schoenberg but, in the ghostly way it revealed itself, resembled little else.".
[8] Reviewing Hertzberg's cantata Sunday Morning in The New York Times, Zachary Woolfe commented on the work's delicacy, comparing it to the paintings of Robert Ryman and describing music that "begins with sunrise ethereality...and remains raptly restrained even as it condenses and blooms.
"[11] Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Heidi Waleson described the music in Hertzberg's opera The Wake World as having "the sheen and muscle of Strauss wedded to the diaphanous spirit of Debussy, but with a distinctly modern edge".
[20] Covering the same work in The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini noted, "The score, spiked with modernist elements, makes Mr. Hertzberg seem like a 21st century Ravel.
"[19] Discussing the 2020 recording of The Wake World in Opera, John Rockwell wrote, "Hertzberg's poetic text is positively lurid; it makes Wilde's Salome sound downright prosaic.
"[45] Rockwell continues to identify numerous references he perceives in the music and libretto, including Daphnis et Chloé, Pelléas et Mélisande, Salome and Die Frau Ohne Schatten, the Flowermaidens and the Rhinemaidens, Lulu, Bluebeard's Castle, Alice in Wonderland and Orlando, before concluding "Yet for all of that, Hertzberg's opera sounds completely original."