Missy Mazzoli was recently deemed “one of the more consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York” (The New York Times), “Brooklyn’s post-millennial Mozart” (Time Out New York) and “one of the new wave of scarily smart young composers” (sequenza21.com). Her music has been performed all over the world by the Kronos Quartet, eighth blackbird, pianist Emanuel Ax, the Detroit Symphony, the LA Philharmonic, the Minnesota Orchestra, the American Composers Orchestra, JACK Quartet, Opera Philadelphia, New York City Opera, cellist Maya Beiser, violinist Jennifer Koh, pianist Kathleen Supové, Dublin’s Crash Ensemble, the Sydney Symphony and many others. She is currently Composer-in-Residence with Opera Philadelphia, Gotham Chamber Opera and Music Theatre-Group, and in 2011/12 was Composer/Educator in residence with the Albany Symphony. Missy was a visiting professor of music at New York University in 2013, and recently joined the composition faculty at the Mannes College of Music, a division of the New School.
The 2015/16 season will include many new projects and collaborations, including a premiere by acclaimed chamber ensemble yMusic, a residency with the Boulder Philharmonic sponsored by New Music USA’s Music Alive Program, a performance of her multimedia chamber opera Song from the Uproar at LA Opera and other performances of her work by the Phoenix Symphony, the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, and Grammy-winning vocal group Roomful of Teeth. Along with librettist Royce Vavrek, Missy is also working on Breaking the Waves, a chamber opera based on Lars von Trier’s 1996 film, commissioned by Opera Philadelphia. Breaking the Waves will premiere in September, 2016 at the Perelman Theater in Philadelphia.
Mazzoli is an active pianist and keyboardist, and often performs with Victoire, a band she founded in 2008 dedicated to her own compositions. Their debut full-length CD, Cathedral City, was named one of 2010′s best classical albums by Time Out New York, NPR, the New Yorker and the New York Times. Their second album will be released in March, 2015. In the past few years they have played in venues all over the world including the M.A.D.E. Festival in Sweden, the C3 Festival in Berlin, Millennium Park (Chicago), The Winter Garden (New York, as part of the Bang-on-a-Can New Music Marathon), Overtoom 301 (Amsterdam), The Music Gallery (Toronto) and Le Poisson Rouge (New York, as part of the Wordless Music Series). In February 2011 they joined The National, Owen Pallett and Efterklang on a tour of the Netherlands as part of the Cross-Linx Festival, and in November 2011 joined My Brightest Diamond (Shara Worden) for performances in Belgium and Paris. Pitchfork praised Victoire for “condensing moments of focused beauty and quiet conviction from the pandemic distractions of modern life," WNYC dubbed the group “consuming and arresting," and NPR’s First Listen asks “Is Victoire’s music post-rock, post-mimimalist or pseudo-post-pre-modernist indie-chamber-electronica? It doesn’t particularly matter. It’s just good music.”
