Press

“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 star has been in the ascendant for some 20 years, taking a sharp upturn in 2016 with the premiere of her operatic adaptation of the film Breaking the Waves…Halfway through this all-orchestral programme, launching a day of “total immersion” in her music at the Barbican, we hear her (highly accomplished) final graduate piece, These Worlds in Us, which encapsulates her interest in things that whirl or wheeze…These instruments were…put to best effect in the programme’s first piece, Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres)…they magically extended the already colourful palette of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, here under the reliable baton of Dalia Stasevska, managing somehow to extract even more silver out of the strings…the sound world — dark yet bright — is compelling. “I feel, in my life, like I’m writing one big piece,” Mazzoli has said, and long may it continue. 4/5 stars.”