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.
David Shengold, Opera News
“Mazzoli is a once-in-a-generation magician of the orchestra… [The Listeners] is perhaps her most original work to date… sinuously songful vocal lines; furtively expressive instrumental solos; a harmonic language that finds newness and strangeness in the interstices of traditional tonality; unerring narrative pacing.”
Raw and riveting, discomfiting and relentlessly contemporary. “The Listeners” is all that and more. The 2½-hour work, which opened Sunday afternoon at Lyric Opera of Chicago and runs through April…
Last November, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York called for an “artistic reinvention” of the form in an op-ed headlined “How to Save Opera in America?…
Claire Devon, the protagonist of Missy Mazzoli’s seductively nightmarish opera “The Listeners,” is living contentedly as a suburban schoolteacher somewhere in the Southwest when she is beset by an inexplicable,…
A strange phenomenon has brought together a diverse group of people in a US suburb. For weeks or months, a persistent, low hum has been heard by each of them,…
Composer Missy Mazzoli: ‘Opera is a place where classical music can talk to contemporary society’ The US premiere of Missy Mazzoli’s opera The Listeners arrives in Philadelphia in September. She…
An ex-ENO artistic head and the co-director who staged War Horse working on a contemporary opera about drug addiction crisis The opioid crisis is to be the subject of a…
“The BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Total Immersion day was a chance to get to know a broad cross section of [Mazzoli’s] work, culminating in a staging of her first opera, Song…
“[Missy Mazzoli] proved an ideal choice [for BBC’s Total Immersion], with large and small works to her credit, and a recognisably individual voice…The contrasting Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) and These…
“The music of Missy Mazzoli feels so full of potential, so fresh and elastic, that you’d be forgiven for thinking the American composer was just starting out. In reality, her…
“At the heart of the classical music world, a revolution is quietly unfolding, led by the indomitable Missy Mazzoli…Missy Mazzoli’s recent Grammy nomination for ‘Dark with Excessive Bright’ underscores her…
“Missy Mazzoli’s compositions, performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Dalia Stasevska, transported the audience through a kaleidoscope of auditory experiences. Pieces like Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres)…
“The goal can’t be to make art to satisfy everyone’s demands, because then you’re not really creating anything that is daring, or far reaching.” “Breaking the Waves broke the world…
Missy Mazzoli – Dark With Excessive Bright I read in a recent interview that Mazzoli, a composer who has crossed many boundaries, particularly between chamber music and indie rock, now primarily…
Missy Mazzoli: Dark with Excessive Bright album review — weightless and expressive
“Being one of the first two women commissioned to write an opera for New York’s Met has put Missy Mazzoli firmly in the public eye. Her new opera, Lincoln in…
“Ms. Mazzoli, early in her career, played electronic keyboards in Victoire, an ensemble that combined rock and classical instrumentation and played music that seemed to be both and neither. More…
As a youngster in rural Pennsylvania, Missy Mazzoli knew she didn’t want to become an astronaut or a nurse. Instead, she announced at age 10 that she was a composer —…
Alex Ross labels Missy Mazzoli among “a growing cohort of American women taking possession of contemporary opera,” calling Mazzoli’s new opera The Listeners “one of the year’s strongest music-theatre scores.”
Mazzoli says “With each work, I endeavor to provide a new language for thoughts and feelings…I want to provide space in which we can process the overwhelming nature of the…
“After [Haimovitz’s] own arrangement of the Kyrie from Josquin’s Missa Hercules Dux Ferrariae, we hear Missy Mazzoli’s tribute to the same work — with a rhythmic gait that suggests both…
“The program’s molten core was the world premiere of Missy Mazzoli’s Violin Concerto… an unsettling work that opens like a trapdoor… it puts Koh and Mazzoli’s long-brewed chemistry on full…
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.”
