Missy Mazzoli: Dark with Excessive Bright album review — weightless and expressive

Being one of the first two women commissioned to write an opera for New York’s Met has put Missy Mazzoli firmly in the public eye. Her new opera, Lincoln in the Bardo, based on the Booker Prize-winning novel by George Saunders, is eagerly awaited.

In the meantime here is a selection of concertos and orchestral works from the past decade or two. Highly individual, atmospheric, suggestive of deep thought and emotion, they make a fine introduction to Mazzoli’s music.

The album takes its title, Dark with Excessive Bright, from a shape-shifting concerto from 2018. Originally for double bass and string orchestra, it was rewritten with a violin as the soloist, and then again for violin and string quintet. The latter two versions bookend the programme here.

This is music that refuses to be pinned down. It feels weightless as it hovers in an expressive aether, where myriad emotions flicker. Peter Herresthal is the eloquent soloist in both versions, which complement each other in subtlety and sonorities.

Five other works complete the disc. Vespers for Violin reimagines her haunting Vespers for a New Dark Age with sampled keyboards, strings and voices. Orpheus Undone catches the legendary musician in freeze-frame at the moment of Eurydice’s death, timelessness and alienation captured in the moment. These Worlds in Us is wonderfully subtle, finding, in Mazzoli’s words, “a sound palette . . . completely new and strangely familiar”. The same might be said of all the music on this disc.

★★★★☆

‘Missy Mazzoli: Dark with Excessive Bright’ is released by BIS