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.”
“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…
