Critics continue to praise Missy Mazzoli’s 2023 album Dark with Excessive Bright, released with BIS Records.
“[Dark with Excessive Bright]” is an intoxicating work that packs a frequently disorienting punch, heaving with shimmering, shuddering strings…Herresthal also gives an ethereal performance of Mazzoli’s Vespers for Violin, a piece that samples and distorts organs, voices, and strings, in eddying patterns that cocoon the solo line…Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) echoes a swirling solar system in woozy string-led loops that twist and curl towards a series of central climaxes before fading into the void.”
–Clive Paget, Musical America, March 2023
“…the orchestral and chamber versions of New York-based Missy Mazzoli’s ‘violin concerto’ Dark with Excessive Bright make for a fascinating pairing, the orchestral original offering sonic sumptuousness while the chamber incarnation draws the ear with intimate vulnerability…The recorded sound provides all the details and levels of insight that the music requires. This is a magnificent, compelling disc.”
–David Kettle, The STRAD Magazine, April 2023
“Both versions [of Dark with Excessive Bright] 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…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.”
–Karl Nehring, Classical Candor, March 2023
“The solar-system-inspired Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) surges and stretches, its motifs looping; its emotions turning…”
—Rebecca Franks, Limelight Magazine, April 2023
“The piece These Worlds in Us, dedicated to recently deceased father and Vietnam veteran, has an elegiac beauty that is difficult to withstand…The second part [of Orpheus Undone], ”We, of violence, we endure”, allows sheer melodic strands of spiraling hope between the heavy, fateful riffs.”
–Sofia Nyblom, Dagens Naheter, March 2023
“There is always a clear sense of purpose to Mazzoli’s music, not to mention the undeniable presence of a highly developed and probing intelligence at work.”
–textura, April 2023