Missy Mazzoli: Dark with Excessive Bright
BIS Records

Born in 1980, Missy Mazzoli's list of accomplishments is, to put it mildly, impressive. Nominated in 2019 for a Grammy, she is one of the first two women (Jeanine Tesori the other) to receive a mainstage commission from the Metropolitan Opera and was honoured by Musical America as ‘2022 Composer of the Year.' Her music has been performed widely by numerous orchestras and ensembles as well as by her own outfit Victoire, which she founded in 2008 and in which she plays keyboards. As someone whose development coincided with the evolution of digital production techniques, she's as comfortable operating within an electronic milieu as in a traditional one. Her stylistic command is as broad, as handily illustrated by this excellent recording of mostly world premiere recordings. As novelist Garth Greenwell astutely notes in text packaged with the release, Mazzoli's music, while resolutely oriented towards the future, reflects a deep grasp of the music that came before and reveals her audacious gift for imagining it anew.

Lending unifying shape to the sixty-six-minute release, the title work is heard in two versions, the first performed by violin soloist Peter Herresthal with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of James Gaffigan and the second Herresthal again, this time accompanied by a string quintet drawn from the Arctic Philharmonic and led by Tim Weiss. He also leads the Arctic Philharmonic through performances of Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres), These Worlds in Us, and the two-part Orpheus Undone. Only one of the six works presented was recorded previously, Vespers for Violin, in this iteration performed by Herresthal against an electronic soundtrack.

Opening the release is Dark with Excessive Bright (2021) in its version for solo violin and string orchestra, with Herresthal delivering a majestic performance and the Bergen Philharmonic supporting marvelously. Originally created as a concerto for double bass and string orchestra in 2019, Mazzoli recast it at Herresthal's request as a concerto for violin and string orchestra. The work's arresting title derives from Milton's Paradise Lost as a description of God's robes, but for the composer the phrase also applies to “the ghostly, heart-rending sound of strings.” The fourteen-minute piece might be seen as representative of her music in the way it roots itself in baroque idioms yet also inhabits the contemporary realm in its daring incorporation of string techniques from different time periods. The coupling of Herresthal's solo voice with the lustrous string textures of the orchestra makes for a shimmering, at times fantastical presentation that's often riveting, especially when the music rises and falls in a series of glissandos. The album-closing treatment for solo violin and string quintet could be seen as a bonus, yet while that's true it also affords another opportunity to savour Herresthal's artistry in a slightly more intimate presentation. With only six strings in play, it's easy to become enraptured by the transfixing work and its elegiac baroque tone.

A rather woozy quality informs the opening of Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) (2013), which she characterizes as “music in the shape of a solar system, a collection of rococo loops that twist around each other within a larger orbit.” With the music gently churning and resisting tonal stability, a sense of free-floating establishes itself as well as feelings of child-like wonder and awe. If These Worlds in Us (2006) is the recording's most plaintive work, it might be explained by the fact that she wrote it with her father, who was a soldier in the Vietnam War, in mind. The title comes from “The Lost Pilot,” a poem by James Tate that references two figures, one on the ground and another in a swooping plane, and advances through multiple contrasting scenarios, some agitated and energized, others contemplative and yearning.

Like many others before her, Mazzoli drew for inspiration from classic Greek mythology for Orpheus Undone (2021), an orchestral suite commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, but approached it in novel manner by focusing on a single moment in the titular character's life, the one immediately following Eurydice's death—in the composer's words “a sixteen-minute freeze frame.” The bewilderment, temporal collapse, and fragmentation that attend a traumatizing moment are explored by her in two parts, with the urgency of the first (“Behold the Machine, O Death”) conveyed by a ticking percussive pattern and surging strings and woodwinds and the comparative calm of the second (“We of Violence, We Endure”) perhaps suggesting a mind coming to grips with the tragedy. A reimagining of her composition Vespers for a New Dark Age, Vespers for Violin (2014) returns the album's focus to Herresthal and magnificently so when his violin swoops entrancingly against a hazy, dreamlike backdrop created from samples of keyboards, organs, voices, and strings.

There is always a clear sense of purpose to Mazzoli's music, not to mention the undeniable presence of a highly developed and probing intelligence at work. As Greenwell correctly notes, these pieces are journeys in which no step is forgotten, “so that one arrives in a place that feels at once familiar and absolutely new.” Such a description could be applied not just to the six works on this release but to her distinguished output in its entirety.

April 2023