Missy Mazzoli: Dark with Excessive Bright (SACD Review)

by Karl Nehring

Missy Mazzoli: Dark with Excessive Bright, Concerto for solo violin and string orchestra*; Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres)**; These Worlds in Us**; Orpheus Undone**; Vespers for Violin (for solo violin with electronic soundtrack); Dark with Excessive Bright (arranged for solo violin and string quintet)***. Peter Herresthal, violin soloist; Bergen Philharmonic/James Gaffigan, conductor; **Arctic Philharmonic/Tim Weiss, conductor; ***Quintet from the Arctic Philharmonic (Oganes Girunyan, violin I; Øyvind Mehus, violin II; Natalya Girunyan, viola; Mary Auner, cello; Ingvild Maria Mehus, double bass);Tim Weiss, conductor. BIS-2572 SACD

 

The title composition of this release by American composer Missy Mazzoli (b. 1980), which opens and closes the program on this BIS SACD (I auditioned the CD layer only) exists in at least three versions. Mazzoli originally composed it as a concerto for double bass and string orchestra. As she explains about the two versions that appear on this recording, “in 2019, at the request of soloist Peter Herresthal, I transformed this piece into a concerto for violin and string orchestra, essentially flipping the original work upside-down… While loosely based in baroque idioms, this piece slips between string techniques from several centuries, all while twisting a pattern of repeated chords beyond recognition. ‘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. In 2019, again at the request of Peter Herresthal, I arranged this piece for soloist and string quintet.” Curiously, Mazzoli’s liner notes state that both arrangements were done in 2019, while the back cover gives the dates for both arrangements as 2021.  My guess is that both are half-correct: 2019 for the violin/string orchestra arrangement and 2021 for the violin/string quintet version. 

In any event, the arrangements for violin and string orchestra and violin and string quintet open and close the program, respectively. The former is intense, brooding, introspective, leaning more to the dark than the bright. The chamber-music scale of the latter arrangement somehow makes the piece much more inviting and involving. Both versions, however, are engrossing in their own way; moreover, having the two different arrangements on the same disc will afford the serious listener the opportunity to ponder the ways in which they differ in terms of both sonority and aesthetic/emotional appeal. Following the opening arrangement of Dark with Excessive Bright on the program comes Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres), which Mazzoli describes as “music in the shape of a solar system, a collection of rococo loops that twist around each other within a larger orbit.” That sounds rather imposing, but the music is not as ponderous as all that. Now with a full orchestra making music, we hear more contrasting sonorities, with brass and string sounds whirling and swirling. The next selection, These Worlds in Us, carries on with the whirling and swirling; if anything, even more exuberantly. The title may suggest introspection, but the sound is assertive and outgoing. Mazzoli writes, “this piece is dedicated to my father, who was a soldier during the Vietnam War. I  like the idea that music can reflect painful and blissful sentiments in a single note or gesture, and have sought to create a sound palette that I hope is at once completely new and strangely familiar to the listener.”

When I heard the woodblock at the beginning of the next composition, Orpheus Undone, I immediately flashed to Short Ride in a Fast Machine by John Adams (see an Adams review here), which opens in the same way. But Orpheus Undone is far different from the Adams work. Throughout its two movements it bristles with restless energy. As Mazzoli describes the effect of the piece, “then listener feels Orpheus’s sense of timelessness and alienation, for a moment joining him in what Nietzsche called the hourglass of existence, turning over and over’.”  Next up is the highlight of the album – for these ears at least – a truly captivating work for amplified violin and electronics titled Vespers for Violin. Mazzoli writes of this this work that it “began as a reimagining of my composition Vespers for a New Dark Age. I sampled keyboards, vintage organs, voices and strings from that composition, drenched them in delay and distortion, and reworked them into a piece that can be performed by a soloist.” Her reference to drenching sounds in delay and distortion might tend to scare some potential listeners off, but I hope not, for the end result sounds at times as though Herresthal is performing in a cathedral along with an organ and an ethereal wordless choir. It is an utterly spellbinding performance. 

The program closes as Herresthal’s violin takes the lead once more, this time in the chamber version of the title piece, Dark with Excessive Bright, which in this more intimate arrangement communicates with a captivating intensity throughout its nearly 14 minutes. As we have come to expect from BIS, the engineering is impeccable, which combined with insights from the composer herself about her richly imaginative music – not to mention the virtuosic performances by Herresthal and the his accompanying orchestral and chamber players – make this a highly recommendable release indeed.