I’ve listened to and liked a lot of Missy Mazzoli’s operatic and vocal music but hadn’t had much exposure to her purely instrumental writing so was interested to get hold of a copy of her new SACD release Dark with Excessive Bright.
The title track was originally composed as a concerto for double bass and string orchestra but here it’s given in two reworkings for solo violin; one with string orchestra and the other with string quintet. The soloist is Peter Herresthal and in the orchestral version he’s accompanied by Bergen Philharmonic conducted by James Gaffigan. I think all the hallmarks of Mazzoli’s music, excet perhaps the use of electronics, are present in this piece. There’s a baroque sensibility combined with 20th century minimalism but in the context of the 21st century’s embrace of individual voices rather than dominant fashions. So, largely tonal chords are recycled n different, fairly repetitive rhythmic patterns, but it never gets dull or new agey. I think I like the arrangement for string quintet even more. Here it’s players from the Arctic Philharmonic conducted by Tim Weiss accompanying. The textures are lighter and it seems to have more clarity. Good stuff.
Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres), played by the Arctic Philharmonic and Weiss, is fascinating. There are rococo loops, slow at first, then wilder, playing over a hurdy gurdy like wheezing, droning sound. It gets louder and more insistent and quite ominous before fading away into nothingness. Continue reading
sweet light crude is a 2010 album by the ensemble Newspeak. It contains six pieces by different composers in a style that has been called “punk classical”. To me, the six pieces are varied enough that I’d be reluctant to put a two word label on the “style” but it’s certainly reflective of a certain kind of New York music making that combines contemporary classical influences with a whole lot of other stuff.
There was never a chance that Emily D’Angelo’s solo recital at Koerner Hall was going to be a steady procession of German lieder and French chansons with the odd Broadway number thrown in and it wasn’t. It was what D’Angelo fans would expect and (some of us at least) crave; lots of women composers and lots of contemporary music. There were five sets.
Alburnum is a record of contemporary American art song from baritone Brian Mulligan (Torontonians may remember him as Enrico in the COC’s 2013 Lucia di Lammermoor) and pianist Timothy Long. There are two substantial pieces; each about 26 minutes long. The first is Walden by Gregory Spears and it sets four prose extracts from Thoreau’s work with an extremely minimalist piano accompaniment. I’m not really sure about turning prose into song and I’m not a huge Thoreau fan. Perhaps if I were I would have found this more interesting. It’s pleasant enough; it’s tonal and somewhat melodic and Mulligan has a pleasant voice but I wasn’t excited.
2021 was another year of parts. Pretty much no live indoor performances before September then a few chances to get to the theatre and now, well who knows? So what stood out for me in 2021? Here’s a round up by category.
Cathedral City was the (2010) debut album of Missy Mazzoli’s ensemble Victoire. All the tracks are music composed by Mazzoli and give a pretty good feel for her non-operatic output. It’s been described as a “distinctive blend of post-rock dreamscapes and quirky minimalism” and that seems as good a description as any. Virtuosic instrumental playing is mixed with live vocals, electronics and distorted recorded speech fragments. Often the material is looped and the basic acoustic changed to create a different sound scape. The music is by turns, drivingly energetic, brutal and gently lyrical. It’s like the work of no other composer I know and I find it really compelling.
Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek’s opera Song From the Uproar: The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt is based on the journals of Isabelle Eberhardt; a Swiss explorer, mystic and writer who roamed the deserts of North Africa before her untimely death at the age of 27. It was conceived as a multi-media opera and staged as such at The Kitchen in New York in 2012. A studio CD recording was made by the original cast soon after. One can get a s sense for the look and feel of the stage piece from 
Feel like listening to something different? Then I can recommend Missy Mazzoli’s 2014 genre defying Vespers for a New Dark Age. Conceptually it reimagines the traditional vespers prayer service with its, perhaps, archaic formality to explore he way we confront technology, ghosts, death, doubt and God in our “new dark age”.
operaramblings 