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.
“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.”
“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…
