A blazing-hot composer of radical multi-genre music, Missy Mazzoli brings her Violin Concerto (Procession) to this season’s Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. The piece was written for violinist Jennifer Koh, who will perform it at the opening concert on Aug. 1.
A prodigy approaching her hyper-productive mid-forties, Mazzoli can boast of being one of the first two women to receive a commission from New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, and she’s also the founder and keyboardist for Victoire, an electro-acoustic band. A go-to creator of musical storytelling, her operatic works include SALT (a mini-opera about Lot’s wife) and the Met-commissioned Lincoln in the Bardo, from the book by George Saunders with libretto by Pulitzer Prize winner Royal Vavrek (premiering in 2026).
And she’s writing the music for The Galloping Cure, an opera about the opioid crisis (another 2026 premiere). The opera’s developer, John Berry—the former artistic director of the English National Opera—calls Mazzoli “one of the world’s most exciting opera composers.”
Collaborators for 16 years, Mazzoli and Koh have grown into a simpatico creative collaboration, one that inflects and flavors their musical relationship. In Violin Concerto (Procession) the soloist is soothsayer, sorcerer and healer, leading the orchestra through five interconnected healing spells, from medieval processions to cast out evil spirits, through hymns to cure broken limbs and ancient charms to prevent plague. In the final movement, “Ascending,” the piece circles back to its beginning and leads the orchestra upward in a burst of sheer joy.
In a recent interview, Mazzoli talked about her work for the festival’s opening concert.
On her collaboration with violinist Jennifer Koh: “She’s just this incredibly deep person who investigates everything, feels everything very deeply. Her interests range from film to philosophy to literature, and everything in between. The first piece I wrote for her was in 2009 and was called Dissolve, O my Heart. It was a solo piece commissioned by the LA Philharmonic. That was actually the first time I met her. And then I wrote three other solo works for her throughout the years, and have performed with her, toured around the country and Canada. A couple years ago she said, ‘You know, I really think that we need to work on a concerto together.’ I feel a lot of her wide-ranging intellect made its way into the concerto.”
On sheer willpower: “I was really struck when we started performing together at how much Jen rehearses. She’s a rehearsing machine, always working. And I really relate to that. I think that my success as a musician, so much of it is just sheer willpower and hours put in. I don’t think there’s necessarily anything mysterious going on in our brain chemistry or our wiring. It’s just that we worked so hard we put in the hours. It’s just a joy to be around her.”
A favorite passage of the concerto: “There’s a bit at the end of the concerto where it just kind of becomes a joyous ascension. So the final movement of five movements is called ‘Procession Ascending,’ and it sort of takes all the material from the first movement and reorders it so that it’s going from low to high. The end is just like pure release and pure joy. So I really, I love that.”
Composing this piece in Ingmar Bergman’s house on the Baltic Sea: My friends Mika Karlsson and Royce Vavrek were working on a residency on an island in the Baltic Sea, where Bergman had his house and foundation, and they invited me to join them. It was in 2021 and it was very much inspired by the circumstances of the pandemic. We were exploring every day in Bergman’s world. It was a magical two months, watching his films in his own theater. We’d go to this beach where they filmed Persona, for example. We were just kind of in that world. And so a lot of the themes that he was obsessed with—you know, life and death, the afterlife, human relationships in times of great struggle—they were really floating around in my mind as I made this music.”
Read our cover story: Cabrillo Festival Brings It: Colorful and courageous season celebrates transformative music, by Christina Waters
