Dark with Excessive Bright (Concerto for Violin and String Orchestra) (2021)

…we now have a fuller picture of Missy Mazzoli the orchestral composer in the album Dark with Excessive Bright, highlighting four harmonically fresh, dramatically charged works.

…in the title track, a violin concerto, she blends a crepuscular string section with glittering passages for the soloist.

Missy Mazzoli writes so brilliantly for the violin in Dark with Excessive Bright...

The title work on this album started out as a concerto for double-bass and chamber orchestra, and was then adapted as a violin concerto with string orchestra, and as a string sextet with a leading voice (both versions are played here). Hers is an arresting voice of creative daring and structural innovation. She takes the sound of a small band tuning up and develops it into a full-throated conversation, challenging listeners to butt in, daring them to walk out. The sound is glacial, the landscape bare. Myself, I hardly dared move until it was over. Peter Herresthal is the gripping soloist; he follows up with a slightly older Mazzoli work, Vespers, for solo violin and electronic soundtrack.

This is music that refuses to be pinned down. It feels weightless as it hovers in an expressive aether, where myriad emotions flicker. Peter Herresthal is the eloquent soloist in both versions, which complement each other in subtlety and sonorities.

Ms. Mazzoli’s disinclination to embrace a specific school of thought about tonality or style, and her imaginative approach to orchestration, have allowed her to create idiosyncratic sound worlds. In “Dark With Excessive Bright”…the solo violin line moves between modal and chromatic passages, preening Romanticism and timbral effects, all shining through a dark, moody ensemble fabric.

Dark with Excessive Bright – beautiful sounds. The way the solo violin slides and slips into and between the percussive texture of the ensemble. The way the strings play memories of Baroque baselines welling up around the soloist – really entrancing.

Armed with an orchestra full of instruments, and a penchant for unusual harmonies, Mazzoli conjures peculiar sounds…[Dark with Excessive Bright] riffs on baroque formulas while recycling motifs in fresh disguises. Like a photographer, Mazzoli captures moments rich in texture and charged with expression…Mazzoli likes to think of herself as primarily an opera composer. But with instrumental music as expressive and rigorously built as this — not to mention the dynamic performances here by the Bergen and Arctic Philharmonic Orchestras — we kindly ask that she not forget the command she holds over a symphony orchestra.