Composer
Missy Mazzoli
has gained the most attention for her operas, but she has also written a good deal of orchestral music. She is becoming better known outside her native U.S., and the present recording is fortuitous: the talents of the
Arctic Philharmonic
and
Bergen Philharmonic
are ideally suited to her orchestral works, with clean planes of sound that set off specific moments of unusual texture like the three-harmonica passages in
Sinfonia: For Orbiting Spheres
. Only one work here,
Vespers for violin
, uses electronics, but most of them are electronic-like;
Mazzoli
is adept at using the orchestra to generate unconventional sounds.
Dark with Excessive Bright
, whose title comes from
Milton
's Paradise Lost, is a violin concerto of sorts, seemingly a more conventional configuration, but it appears in two highly different versions (and itself was derived from a double bass concerto). This makes a good place to start with
, especially inasmuch as the performances by violinist
Peter Herresthal
are brilliantly edgy. What is exciting about
is that her music may appeal to fans of orchestral minimalism while actually going in completely different directions, and it seems likely that this release from the
BIS
label will bring her admirers in new realms. ~ James Manheim