Missy Mazzoli’s distinctive music draws on influences from the Baroque to minimalism and indie rock, reaching hearts and minds through a complex language that’s sharp, savvy and warmly inclusive. In the UK, the American composer is best known for her opera Breaking the Waves, based on Lars von Trier’s film, seen at the 2019 Edinburgh international festival. The BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Total Immersion day was a chance to get to know a broad cross section of her work, culminating in a staging of her first opera, Song from the Uproar: The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt.
Following the deaths of her mother, brother and father, the Swiss-born Eberhardt took herself off to north Africa where she commenced a life of unfettered self-discovery. She rode deserts on horseback dressed as a man, outraged the French authorities, married an Algerian soldier, converted to Sufism and died at the age of 27 in a flash flood.
Mazzoli came across her journals in 2004 and, with librettist Royce Vavrek, worked them up into something that’s part opera, part song cycle. It’s a conceit that demands you know the backstory, not exactly aided here by Isabelle Kettle’s decision to stage it as an oblique memory play. Nevertheless, music and text combined to create a poetically emotional brew.
It’s a dazzlingly original score, written for just five instruments – piano, flute, clarinet, bass and electric guitar (drawn from the BBC Symphony Orchestra) – but enhanced by electronics and bolstered by a substantial chorus, the excellent BBC Singers. Given the opera’s themes of bereavement and suicide, the music’s upbeat syncopations, with woodwind licks, pealing piano and grungy guitar came as a pleasant surprise. At times pre-recorded sound emerged from a haze of static, like voices out of the past.
Kitty Whately made a memorable protagonist, her spotless mezzo-soprano and crisp diction bringing clarity to an elusive staging. Dressed in pants and singlet, Lucia Chocarro danced Eberhardt’s lover but more frequently embodied her spirit of adventure. Sofi Jeannin was an assured conductor. It certainly whetted the appetite for Mazzoli’s fifth opera, Lincoln in the Bardo, due to be premiered in the US in 2026.
• This article was amended on 27 February 2024. Information in the concert programme incorrectly stated that Missy Mazzoli’s opera Lincoln in the Bardo was due to premiere at the English National Opera next year. This is no longer the case.
