Dark with Excessive Bright was commissioned by Principal Bass Maxime Bibeau in celebration of his 20th year with the orchestra. “I was inspired in no small part by Maxime’s double bass, a massive instrument built in 1580 that was stored in an Italian monastery for hundreds of years and even patched with pages from the Good Friday liturgy’, says Mazzoli. ‘I imagined this instrument as a historian, an object that collected the music of the passing centuries in the twists of its neck and the fibres of its wood, finally emerging into the light at age 400 and singing it all into the world.’