Missy Mazzoli after the premiere of her opera Proving Up at the Kennedy Center, 2018
Missy Mazzoli (born October 27, 1980) is an American composer and pianist who is a member of the composition faculty at the Mannes College of Music.[1] In 2018, she became one of the first two women to receive a commission from the Metropolitan Opera House.[2] She is the founder and keyboardist for Victoire, an electro-acoustic band. From 2012-2015 she was composer-in-residence at Opera Philadelphia, in collaboration with Gotham Chamber Opera and Music-Theater Group.[3] Her music is published by G. Schirmer.[4] Mazzoli received a 2015 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, a Fulbright Grant to the Netherlands, and in 2018 was nominated for a Grammy Award in the category of Best Classical Composition.[5] In 2018, Mazzoli was named for a two-season term as the Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.[6] Mazzoli was named the Bragg Artist-in-Residence at Mount Allison University in Canada beginning in 2022.[7]
Mazzoli has released three full-length albums of her music to date: Cathedral City,[10] written for her band Victoire (2010), Song from the Uproar,[11] the original cast recording of her first opera (2012), and Vespers for a New Dark Age[12] (2015), a work for her band Victoire in collaboration with percussionist Glenn Kotche (of Wilco) and vocalists Martha Cluver, Melissa Hughes and Virginia Kelsey. Vespers for a New Dark Age was commissioned by Carnegie Hall and premiered there in February 2014.[13] All of Mazzoli's records were released on Brooklyn-based label New Amsterdam Records.[citation needed]
Mazzoli's first opera, Song from the Uproar: The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt, based on the life of Swiss explorer and writer Isabelle Eberhardt, premiered at New York venue The Kitchen in March 2012. The piece was created in collaboration with librettist Royce Vavrek, filmmaker Stephen Taylor and director Gia Forakis. The Wall Street Journal called this work "powerful and new"[15] and The New York Times said that "in the electric surge of Ms. Mazzoli's score you felt the joy, risk, and limitless potential of free spirits unbound."[16]
On November 13, 2012, the original cast recording of Song from the Uproar was released on New Amsterdam Records.[17] In October 2015 LA Opera presented the second full production as part of their "Off Grand" series at REDCAT.
Breaking the Waves
Mazzoli's opera Breaking the Waves, an adaptation of Lars von Trier's 1996 Cannes Grand Prix-winning film Breaking the Waves, with a libretto by Royce Vavrek, was commissioned by Opera Philadelphia and Beth Morrison Projects. The opera premiered in Philadelphia on September 22, 2016[18] gaining many positive reviews. Opera News wrote that "Breaking the Waves stands among the best 21st-century American operas yet produced.".[19] Heidi Waleson in her review for The Wall Street Journal wrote: "Mr. Vavrek's spare, eloquent libretto leaves ample space for Ms. Mazzoli's music to create a complex portrait of Bess and her stark environment. … Ms. Mazzoli's score deftly balances trenchant arias with a kaleidoscopic orchestration whose layers and colors suggest Messiaen, Britten and Janáček but is finally all her own."[20] The opera was nominated for the 2017 International Opera Award for Best World Premiere,[21] and won the inaugural Music Critics Association of North America Award for Best New Opera in 2017.[22] In 2019 Scottish Opera announced it would present Breaking the Waves on a world tour beginning at the 2019 Edinburgh International Festival, in a new production directed by Tom Morris.
Mazzoli wrote and performed several songs for the soundtrack of the acclaimed classical music exposé, Mozart in the Jungle, most notably "Impromptu", and other work presented within the show's continuity as by character Thomas Pembridge, retired conductor of the (fictional) New York Symphony.[29]
Critical reception
Mazzoli was described by The New York Times as "one of the more consistently inventive and surprising composers now working in New York",[30] and by Time Out New York as "Brooklyn's post-millennial Mozart".[31] On November 23, 2012[32] and March 28, 2015, Mazzoli was a guest on NPR's All Things Considered.[33]
Mazzoli is the recipient of four ASCAP Young Composer Awards, a Fulbright Grant to the Netherlands, the Detroit Symphony's Elaine Lebenbom Award,[34] and grants from the Jerome Foundation, American Music Center, and the Barlow Endowment.[35]
After the LA premiere of her first opera, Song from the Uproar, Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times wrote that "Her wonderful score is seductive, meditative, spiritually elusive and subversive. With it, we can welcome a new natural for the art form."[36]
