The balance of the elemental and ethereal is present in the vocal lines, too, especially for Miles, the son chosen for the fatal errand. Sudden drooping slides and players sawing away at their string instruments, punctuated by the somberly shuddering twang of horn and trumpet, give a sense of wandering and rootlessness. Mazzoli’s chaotic refractions of hoedown fiddling occasionally explode within a landscape of jittery unease. (Glassiness is, unsurprisingly, a quality of much of the score.) The shadowy sound of guitars drifts through the music Ms. Mazzoli conjures bleakness with an uncanny, confident mixture of instrumental savagery and eerie lightness, as when a moody orchestral storm recedes into the glassy drone of harmonicas. It turns that intimacy into grim claustrophobia.Īs in her 2016 opera “Breaking the Waves,” Ms. “Proving Up” is on a chamber scale: a running time of less than 90 minutes, an orchestra of about a dozen, seven people onstage, no chorus. Mazzoli, that means two new operas: a mainstage spectacle, likely based on the George Saunders novel “Lincoln in the Bardo,” and a chamber piece to be performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Recently, the Metropolitan Opera announced that she and Jeanine Tesori would be the first female composers it would commission. While it’s well worth hearing, there’s just one more performance, on Friday evening, and it’s nearly sold out.īut this is hardly the last we’ll be hearing from Ms.

A tense and creepy journey into the heart of Manifest Destiny’s darkness, the opera “Proving Up” instructs us, teeth clenched, that the American dream eludes even - especially - those who give everything to gain it.Ĭomposed by Missy Mazzoli, with a libretto by Royce Vavrek, the brooding work had its New York premiere on Wednesday at the Miller Theater at Columbia University.

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