Missy Mazzoli - "Dark with Excessive Bright" album review
Missy Mazzoli - Dark with Excessive Bright album review
Mazzoli has found a sound which works for her, somewhere between tonal post-minimalism and the cliches of modern film music.
Dark with Excessive Bright is the latest album release by esteemed New York-based composer, Missy Mazzoli. The album is bookended by two, quite similar recordings of the titular work, modifying her concerto for double bass and string orchestra into a version for violin and string orchestra or string quintet. Peter Herresthal is featured as the violin soloist for Dark with Excessive Bright, and also performs an older work of Mazzoli's, Vespers for Violin, for violin and fixed media.
Three orchestral works, spanning the last two decades of Mazzoli's output, are also featured and are recorded here for the first time: Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres), These Worlds in Us, and Orpheus Undone. The Norwegian-based orchestra, Artic Philharmonic, led by Tim Weiss, presents itself as an ensemble dedicated and fully-engaged with Mazzoli's musical vision. Dark with Excessive Bright will be released on BIS Records in early March 2023 (links to the album will be updated here at a later date).
As an album, Dark with Excessive Bright showcases Mazzoli's general soundscape as a composer. It is awkward, and comes across as redundant, to release the same piece, with the same soloist, twice on one album. The two versions, one for violin and string orchestra and one for violin and string quintet, are almost identical, with the string quintet arrangement simply being reductions of the orchestra divisi parts. Not to mention, the solo part of the titular work gives Herresthal very little with which to work. Rather than rewriting the entire solo bass part for violin, in many sections she simply gives the double bass(es) the original line and Herresthal plays the first violin parts. Both arrangements come across as Mazzoli attempting to unsuccessfully salvage a work she believes may not be performed often, due to it being originally composed for the double bass.
In all the works featured on the album, Mazzoli's timbral choices and harmonic thoughts are indistinguishable. I fear that Dark will only convince listeners that the Grammy-nominated composer is good at writing the same piece over and over again, incredibly surprising for someone deemed "consistently inventive" by critics. Mazzoli has found a sound which works for her, somewhere between tonal post-minimalism and the cliches of modern film music.
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