Missy Mazzoli is the 21st century’s gatecrasher of new classical music.
NPR’s Turning the Tables
The unleashing of Mazzoli’s apocalyptic imagination on the huge Met stage is an occasion eagerly awaited.
Alex Ross, The New Yorker
Proving Up is “harrowing...powerful...a true opera of our time.”
Washington Post
Missy Mazzoli is “Brooklyn’s post-millennial Mozart.”
Time Out New York
Missy Mazzoli’s Harp and Altar [for the Kronos Quartet] offers further evidence that she is among the more consistently inventive and surprising composers now working in New York.
The New York Times
Missy Mazzoli's Breaking the Waves is savage, heartbreaking and thoroughly original.
Heidi Waleson, The Wall Street Journal
Breaking the Waves stands among the best 21st-century American operas yet.
Missy Mazzoli, a longtime friend and collaborator, wrote a piece called “Hail, Horrors, Hail” [for Jennifer Koh’s Alone Together project.] “It comes from a passage in Paradise Lost,” Mazzoli explains. “And…
Missy Mazzoli is sitting in one of Ingmar Bergman’s bedrooms when she joins our Zoom meeting earlier this summer. At the time, the 40-year-old composer was finishing a monthlong artist’s…
“Missy Mazzoli wrote the book on quiet reinvention… when Mazzoli’s residency with the Chicago Symphony formally concludes this month, her legacy will speak for itself.”
“Missy Mazzoli is the most consistent and gifted composer to hold the CSO’s composer in residence position since John Corigliano inaugurated the post in 1987.”
“In 2018, Missy Mazzoli made history when she became one of the first two women (along with Jeanine Tesori) to be commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera. She has chosen to…
“…Proving Up makes for compelling listening. Both the expansive Nebraska landscape and claustrophobic forces of psychology, family, bureaucracy, and blasted hopes are fully present. If those vectors become tangled now…
Missy Mazzoli featured on Radiolab’s episode The Cataclysm Sentence. Summary: One day in 1961, the famous physicist Richard Feynman stepped in front of a Caltech lecture hall and posed this…
“…Nézet-Séguin, who launched his tenure by commissioning operas from composers Missy Mazzoli and Jeanine Tesori (the first women to create new work for the Met in the company’s 140-year history;…
“What happens when you add sound to such formidably oppressive filmic hush? The New York composer Missy Mazzoli has spent years grappling with that question. ‘Back in 2013,’ she says, ‘my…
“The runners up for this year’s award are “An American Soldier” by composer Huang Ruo and librettist David Henry Hwang; and “Proving Up” by composer Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce…
“Best New Work: Washington National Opera’s American Opera Initiative had not produced a new opera that could be called great—until this year. Missy Mazzoli, a composer with a major success…
“…Missy Mazzoli continued her ascendance as one of the most prominent and badass voices in the field. Her latest opera, “Proving Up,” premiered at the Washington National Opera in January, and…
“…Meanwhile, the New York Philharmonic and Metropolitan Opera unveiled dramatic new programming developments under their respective new music directors, Jaap Van Zweden and Yannick Nézet-Séguin. The orchestra had a bold…
“Mazzoli’s third full-length opera, Proving Up, recently closed its acclaimed New York run, and she’s emerging from the whirlwind. Based on a short story by Swamplandia! author Karen Russell, Proving Up examines the American…
“Composer Missy Mazzoli is at the top of her game. Having just premiered her third opera, Proving Up, to wide acclaim, Mazzoli was recently commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera; one of…
“Missy Mazzoli, 38, is trying to tear down the gates for new composers and listeners. She’s a prominent figure in new music; she has three operas to her name with…
“Karen Russell’s short story “Proving Up” is a bleak tale about one such family trying to earn their plot in post-Civil War Nebraska. And it’s now been adapted into a…
“With the New York premiere of “Proving Up,” at the Miller Theater on Sept. 26 and 28, the composer Missy Mazzoli has that contemporary musical miracle: a hotly anticipated third opera, a…
“So far in her impressive career, the music of composer Missy Mazzoli has mostly defied labels. Categorizations like “multimedia” or the more flattering “dynamic amalgamation” carry little weight with the 37-year-old New…
“I think my music is very narrative or cinematic at times,” [Mazzoli] says. “Even my instrumental music usually tells some sort of story. I’m always thinking about the psychology behind…
“The music of Missy Mazzoli is a treat in and of itself and that is especially the case in collaboration with Royce Vavrek. It’s a rarity to see a tale…
“Mazzoli’s music, though clearly contemporary, nevertheless fit the setting and the mood of the opera. And Vavrek’s libretto spoke volumes with relatively few well-chosen words.”
“[Mazzoli] defines her life purpose as “helping people connect to emotions or experiences through music, and enabling more young people, particularly women, to express themselves through composition.” Mazzoli lives out…
“…it was “Proving Up” that left me ruminating in its wake, torn between an experience that was in many ways deliberately unpleasant and the power of the statement its creators…
“In the new music world, however, Mazzoli is less a black sheep than a sacred cow: an “it” girl of the contemporary scene. Seven or eight years ago, she started…
“Already an established fixture on the Brooklyn scene with her band, Victoire, the 36-year-old Mazzoli came to the attention of a wider audience in 2016 with her second opera, “Breaking…
“The opera unfolded like a dream against a bare set consisting of hanging scrims, subtle lighting and a single tree, The music began with a static sound, like an old,…
“I feel very happy to be a role model for young women,” said Mazzoli. “Every day I get email or phone calls from female composers around the world looking for…
“In her two full-length operas to date, Mazzoli has turned her inventive and daring approach to the subject of young women who take risks and make sacrifices to enter the…
“It is not easy to find new operas that command attention, tell their story lucidly, and create a powerful, permeating mood. Dark and daring, Breaking the Waves does all this…
“The two ensembles worked as a single entity. They served seamlessly as supporting cast, stage crew and to a degree, as actual props and scenery throughout the hourlong show, adding…
In a not-so-shocking break with tradition, John Schaefer reveals his “Best Of 2015” list, before 2015 actually ends, but long after most best-of lists have gone to print or air.
“Brooklyn-based composer Missy Mazzoli follows her 2012 release Song from the Uproar: The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt with the equally stellar Vespers for a New Dark Age. Over…
“[Mazzoli’s] wonderful score is seductive, meditative, spiritually elusive and subversive. With it, we can welcome a new natural for the art form. And now all eyes and ears are on…
“Two of the most compelling compositional voices to have emerged from Brooklyn in recent years are Missy Mazzoli and Corey Dargel, who each present their own brands of modern vocal…
“The composer and keyboardist Missy Mazzoli has a thing for unlikely connections and startling gestures, and one of her gifts is the ability to tease out the hidden logic behind her choices.…
“Mazzoli’s Vespers is an ominous twist on an ancient musical and religious tradition — the evening Vesper prayer service observed in many Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican and Lutheran churches. A “distorted, wild, blasphemous take,”…
“Music that once sounded like the lonely movement of your own thoughts now calls out to you in a voice of its own. The singers are bell-clear and troubled, like…
“On purely listening terms, the recording casts a powerful spell. In augmenting the singers’ incantatory vocal lines with resplendent instrumental textures, Mazzoli has fashioned an engrossing classical-electronic-vocal epic that sounds…
“The pianist Shai Wosner again proves himself a fine Schubertian with a gorgeously phrased and soulful interpretation of the “Moments Musicaux” (D. 780) that traverses the full palette of intimacy and power.…
“Curiously addictive…using simple musical materials – a plaintive melody over gently rocking, repeated notes and occasional chordal exclamations in the bass register – Ms. Mazzoli conjures nostalgic longing in her…
“Mazzoli’s is music not so much of, as out of, the spheres. Strings and winds swirl and swoon, sliding magically around pitches. There is no pulse, no thousand points of…
“In Breaking the Waves, based on the von Trier film, Mazzoli’s voice is like a 21st-century refraction of the Smetana/Janacek nexus, conveying the under-the-surface repression in the small-town community.”
“Mazzoli’s compositions have been nothing but excellent, powerful and thought-provoking, and Saturday night’s premiere of Vespers for a New Dark Age continued the stream of works by Mazzoli that leave…
“Their sophomore effort is officially on the way, and Krier’s gorgeous ambient landscape of synths applied to “A Thousand Tongues”, the first song from the project, is a taste of…
“The Constella Festival got it right when they named Missy Mazzoli as this year’s composer-in-residence. At 33, she’s earned the awards, commissions and acclaim you’d expect from artists twice her…
“Missy Mazzoli, whose compositions are equally at home uptown at Carnegie Hall, in the form of orchestral works, or downtown at the Kitchen, as electronic–vocal collaborations, has no qualms about…
“Missy Mazzoli challenges the barriers that historically have kept newly composed classical music away from the ears of many music and arts lovers. Her work is part of a movement…
“Missy Mazzoli wrote “Song from the Uproar: The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt”. The 32-year-old New York composer came across an English edition of Isabelle Eberhardt’s diaries in a…
“Mazzoli is a star of the indie classical world, walking the uneasy ground between the avant garde and rock with a style that’s ethereal and hypnotic yet often wary and…
“Mazzoli possesses a startlingly original imagination plus superb command of vocal-and-instrumental interplay. Song from the Uproar is the latest in what’s, frankly, been a rather staggering run for the New…
“Like Eberhardt, Mazzoli is carving her own path. In a landscape that is ever changing and ever challenging for today’s composers, Mazzoli thrives on a kind of do-it-yourself aesthetic borrowed…
“Solid gold…flowing from one number to the next, the music tells its own story, building to a series of emotional climaxes with the narrative assurance of a bonafide opera composer.”
“Then, in a moment of eerie beauty, [Maya Beiser] slashed the curtain and emerged wearing a filmy lace gown. Burrowing into the ashes covering the stage floor, she retrieved a…
“In Ms. Mazzoli’s “Salt,” Ms. Beiser was joined by Ms. Davis, a singer whose range and color palette vie with that of a cello. Her otherworldly voice and ritualistic gestures…
“What [Mazzoli] does is so entrancing, you can’t imagine any alert denizen of the 21st century not being drawn in. She loves big washes of sound – often eelectric guitar…
“Formed by Missy Mazzoli, a visionary composer and keyboardist based in Bed-Stuy, Victoire is an all-star, all-female quintet, that blends a dreamy post-modern sound, with indie chamber electronica.They describe their…
The New York Times takes a stab at defining the current “movement” of young composers, including Missy Mazzoli, Jefferson Friedman, Du Yun, Judd Greenstein, Nico Muhly, Anna Clyne, and many…
“Another current trend that’s been on the rise over the last five decades is the return to the age of the composer-performer. Those who write music and want it performed…
“Song from the Uproar by Missy Mazzoli was the highlight of last summer’s opera season, thanks to Abigail Fischer’s powerful performance as Isabelle Eberhardt, the Russian-born Swiss adventurer and writer. Although…
“Song from the Uproar by Missy Mazzoli was the highlight of last summer’s opera season, thanks to Abigail Fischer’s powerful performance as Isabelle Eberhardt, the Russian-born Swiss adventurer and writer. Although…
“Reflective avant-garde composer and keyboardist Missy Mazzoli has won dazzling acclaim and critical respect for her somber, swelling pieces, which have resonated through souch hallowed halls as Carnegie Hall and…
Missy and Matthew discuss music, poetry, Missy’s recent album Vespers for a New Dark Age (featuring Matthew’s poetry as lyrics,) compositional processes and childhood loneliness formations, good and bad gigs,…
