Music of light and dark

Missy Mazzoli: Dark With Excessive Bright & other works

Though John Milton was blind when he wrote Paradise Lost, his description of God in Book 3 makes use of visual - indeed painterly - images:

Amidst the glorious brightness where thou sit'st
Thron'd inaccessible, but when thou shad'st
The full blaze of thy beams, and through a cloud
Drawn round about thee like a radiant Shrine,
Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appeer

It's that chiaroscuro effect of Milton's that Missy Mazzoli took as her theme in 2018 when she wrote Dark With Excessive Bright, a concerto for contrabass and string orchestra.

"'Dark with excessive bright', a phrase from Milton’s Paradise Lost, is a surreal and evocative description of God’s robes, written by a blind man. I love the impossibility of this phrase and how perfectly it describes the ghostly, heart-rending sound of strings."

When Mazzoli adapted her original version for violinist Peter Herresthal, she replaced the contrabass with a violin, "... essentially flipping the original work upside-down." It's instructive to compare the two versions; in a way, this new version for violin is almost like a negative image of a photograph. The clever synaesthetic effects, mixing light and dark with high and low sounds and contrasting musical textures, still remain, with this new variation only deepening the total effect of this music. Here is Mazzoli's version for contrabass, as recorded by Maxime Bibeau and the Australian Chamber Orchestra under Richard Tognetti:

There's an additional chapter to this, though. Mazzoli also wrote a version of her original work for contrabass and string quintet, and likewise, then, for this new version for violin and string quintet. This underlies the contrasts between the concertante and ripieno parts, and makes all the string textures more transparent. Both orchestra and quintet versions are included here, and it's fascinating to compare the two. Herresthal is a wonderful violinist, and a fine musician; the shift from virtuoso concerto to more of a chamber music sound is subtle, but finely judged. Likewise with the orchestral players: Jim Gaffigan conducts the Bergen Philharmonic's string forces in the full version, and Tim Weiss conducts players from the Arctic Philharmonic in the chamber work. It's all beautifully played. The BIS engineers provide suitable open and natural acoustic spaces for each version, highlighting all of Missy Mazzoli's subtle effects of texture and sound. This is fascinating music!

Mazzoli's Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) has as one of its themes the Pythagorean concept of the "music of the spheres". This concept, popular in the Renaissance, appears often in Paradise Lost, where Milton, whose father was a composer, can indulge in something closer to his own experience than the visual imagery that relied upon his imagination and memory. But Mazzoli adds another spin here (pun intended), for Sinfonia also refers to the old Italian name for the hurdy gurdy; the "orbiting sphere" becomes more homespun: the hand-cranked rosin wheel of the instrument juxtaposed with the planetary orbits of the neo-Platonists.

These Worlds in Us, from 2006, takes its title from James Tate's poem "The Lost Pilot", about his father's death in World War II, and is dedicated to Missy Mazzoli's own father, who served in the Vietnam War. This is no Spitfire Prelude & Fugue by William Walton; this music is more contemplative than stirring, more about fatherhood than patriotism.

The two-part suite for orchestra Orpheus Undone has a serious program; it's about the moment when Orpheus loses Eurydice. "I have used the Orpheus myth as a way to explore the ways traumatic events disrupt the linearity and unity of our experience of time." This serious concept might have swamped a 16-minute piece for orchestra, but Mazzoli balances a heavy weight with finely drawn themes and slender orchestral effects. In the past few years I've had first-hand experience of how time is bent and tortured during the grieving process, and I found this music both understandable and somehow consoling.

Vespers for Violin, from 2014, was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Classical Composition in 2019. It's played here with panache by Peter Herresthal. This is such an evocative piece; in only six minutes it builds an impressive architecture of yearning and hopefulness. This is one of the finest albums of new classical music I've heard in a long time!

I must mention the wonderful essay by novelist and poet Garth Greenwell included in the liner notes. "This is music of intense drama, pungently gestural," he says, "but Mazzoli’s gestures are never orphaned, leading nowhere, as in so much contemporary music (and contemporary writing, too) that aims for drama." Greenwell praises Mazzoli for "using every resource at her command to think her life and her world at the highest intensity." There's so much here: from a blind poet's imagining of light and shade on a canvas to the entire range of sound available to the 21st century composer, and Missy Mazzoli brings it all to life with such grace and imagination.

The great cover photo is by Mats Bäcker.

This album will be released on March 3, 2023.

Authentic Holst & Elgar from Bergen

Holst: The Planets; Elgar: Enigma Variations

The presentation of Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations in 1899 single-handedly destroyed a stereotype about Un-Musical Britain. It was a new masterwork of orchestral music for the 20th Century, and it was followed in 1916 by another: Gustav Holst's The Planets. Both are now staples of the orchestral repertoire around the world, though perhaps not as totally beloved as in Britain, with its flag-waving Proms audiences. It's instructive, then, to see how many great recorded performances come from outside of the UK: Montreal, Chicago, Berlin, Vienna, to name a few. Andrew Litton, who has made memorable recordings of the Holst from Dallas, and the Elgar from London, provides a musically flawless and authentic performance of both from Norway, with the very fine Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra. So often used as demonstrations of high-end audio, these two works both sound very good, partly because of the BIS engineers, but let's face it, both composers wrote this music to sound good! I should mention that I listened to the stereo version, but I'm sure the surround-sound one is awesome.

Two great works played with energy & drive

This Chandos CD is Andrew Davis's second recording of the coupling of Job and the 9th Symphony, which he recorded with the BBC Symphony in the early 1990s as part of his complete symphonies set for Teldec. In the new disc, Andrew Davis appears with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, pinch hitting for the late Richard Hickox to allow Chandos to finish off a complete Vaughan Williams series. These are both great works. The ballet Job has, according to Michael Kennedy, "the stature and cohesion of a symphony', its 1930 date of composition placing it between the three early symphonies and the three middle ones. The Ninth Symphony was completed just a few months before Vaughan Williams' death; I've always been baffled by the questions about its merits. Perhaps the critics were expecting something else when it was premiered in 1958, but this has always sounded to me just like what it is: a work of great power and complexity.

In February 2014 Jonathan Swain surveyed the available Vaughan Williams 9th Symphony recordings for BBC Radio3's CD Review; you can listen to that program here. Of course this was before the present disc was available, and Vernon Handley's version is Swain's top choice. He likes the first Andrew Davis recording, but wishes he could talk instead about Davis's performance with the BBC SO at the 2008 Proms, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of VW's death. Swain feels Davis's conception of the work has changed, and grown: "it was all gain," he says. I'm thinking he would like the new version very much; he thinks that "energy, drive and brilliance of tone" are vital in this music, and I agree. The Chandos recording, helped by amazing sound (I would have loved to hear the surround sound version), has that in abundance. Davis brings tons of energy to this performance, and the Bergen players come through with flying colours. Speaking of players, the saxophones & flugelhorn shine here. This goes for Job as well, whose incidents are as vivid and sharply described as an Annie Leibowitz photograph. The effect of the organ in the Sixth Scene "A Vision of Satan" (which is dubbed in from a recording of the Rieger organ in the Domkirken, Bergen) is astounding.

Here's Sir Andrew Davis re-conducting his own work, listening on headphones in the studio. You know you want to do the same thing: go for it!

Duelling Prokofievs

There are two complete Prokofiev Symphony series on the go right now: Marin Alsop's on Naxos with the Sao Paulo Symphony (OSESP), and Andrew Litton's on BIS with the Bergen Philharmonic, and a third just finished at the end of 2015, by Kirill Karabits with the Bournemouth Symphony on Onyx. This is music that rewards comparative listening: I can listen for hours to different versions of different symphonies, stopping to compare passages, or just letting the music wash over me. There is a great range in musical styles among the symphonies and miscellaneous orchestral works included on these discs, and even within some of the works themselves. I couldn't listen to this much Shostakovich at once without musical or emotional fatigue. Prokofiev often lightens the moment with an innocent, non-sarcastic motif by the flute, or softens a martial movement with a consoling passage from the strings. He never cloys, and sentimentality seems foreign to him. How many composers can you honestly say this about?

All three of these series have received rave reviews; it's the fine details and one's personal preferences that will help someone decide which one to purchase. Luckily, with nearly ubiquitous streaming services you can pop in and out of all three, or even do some comparisons of your own. Here is Karabits in the grand opening movement of the greatest symphony, no. 6:

And a slightly more expansive reading by Litton:


Alsop's version will be released on August 12, 2016; I'll add the Spotify link here when it's available. Once again, Alsop and the Naxos producer and engineers are taking a best-strings-forward approach, with less of a focus on brass and woodwinds. This results in a softer, more restrained, less acerbic interpretation, which is made clear by listening to the first minute of all three versions (and especially Karabits' witheringly in-your-face beginning, which I found effective in its own way).  There is plenty of power on display from Sao Paulo, though, and Alsop makes sure to highlight Prokofiev's bleakest and harshest passages for maximum poignancy.

When you have orchestras of the calibre of the Bergen, Bournemouth and Sao Paulo ones, and such gifted conductors as Litton, Karabits and Alsop, there are no losers in a competition like this. Only winners: everyone who loves Prokofiev.