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.