Missy Mazzoli: Dark with Excessive Bright

Album review

Composer Missy Mazzoli has gained the most attention for her operas, but she has also written a good deal of orchestral music. She is becoming better known outside her native U.S., and the present recording is fortuitous: the talents of the Arctic Philharmonic and Bergen Philharmonic are ideally suited to her orchestral works, with clean planes of sound that set off specific moments of unusual texture like the three-harmonica passages in Sinfonia: For Orbiting Spheres. Only one work here, Vespers for violin, uses electronics, but most of them are electronic-like; Mazzoli is adept at using the orchestra to generate unconventional sounds. Dark with Excessive Bright, whose title comes from Milton's Paradise Lost, is a violin concerto of sorts, seemingly a more conventional configuration, but it appears in two highly different versions (and itself was derived from a double bass concerto). This makes a good place to start with Mazzoli, especially inasmuch as the performances by violinist Peter Herresthal are brilliantly edgy. What is exciting about Mazzoli is that her music may appeal to fans of orchestral minimalism while actually going in completely different directions, and it seems likely that this release from the BIS label will bring her admirers in new realms.

© James Manheim /TiVo