Missy Mazzoli makes debut in BBC Proms
mainAmerica’s most talked about young composer receives her first showcase in London on September 5.
Details of the BBC Proms have just been released here.
Other highlights includes two Vienna Phil concerts, with Daniel Harding and Michael Tilson Thomas, a brace from the Concertgebouworkest and their new music director Daniele Gatti, a pop-in from Pittsburgh with Anne-Sophie Mutter and from the Stockholm Phil with Renee Fleming… and debuts from the Cincinnati Symph and the orchestra of La Scala, Milan.
Missy Mazzoli?
America’s most talked about what?
Why?
I don’t get it.
The talk is there in an attempt to fill a hughe void.
I’m an American. I’m a conductor. She’s not talked about in my circles as I’ve not heard of her. Hmm.
No offense, but that’s why mainstream classical music, as embodied by the orchestral establishment, is dying.
(Anyway, they’ve certainly heard of her at the Minnesota Orchestra.)
It is not dying, since composers like Nicolas Bacri, Richard Dubugnon, David Matthews, Jonathan Leshnoff, Aaron Jay Kernis, Jennifer Higdon, Pierre Jalbert, Daniel Gilliam, Peter Fribbins, Karol Beffa, Guillaume Connesson, Jake Heggie, Daniel Asia, Richard Danielpour, Paul Moravec, and a couple of others, are working on the preservation of the art form and successfully so. But they don’t stand on the barricades or sell-out to trendy hip, which vanishes as soon as it is heard.
I’m afraid you misunderstood my comment.
I meant that it’s dying because an American conductor can be smug that he and his colleagues have never heard of a major contemporary American composer.
Shocking. But not surprising.
No wonder the mainstream orchestral establishment is fading into obsolescence.
This year, at least, she’s certainly America’s most talked about young opera composer. (Philip Glass, John Adams, and Jake Heggie no longer being young.)
Mazzoli’s opera “Breaking the Waves,” based on the Lars von Trier film, has been a huge success in its premieres at Opera Philadelphia and at the Prototype Festival in New York (which is spearheaded by the formidable Beth Morrison). It was superb and portends a serious career. She might not be the “most talked about” young composer in America, but she is certainly becoming an important figure.
Russell Platt
The New Yorker
WHO?