Missy Mazzoli writes so brilliantly for the violin in Dark with Excessive Bright that it is hard to believe the piece began life as a double-bass concerto. Mazzoli had felt that the ‘impossibility’ of the phrase from Paradise Lost was ‘a strangely accurate way to describe the dark but heart-rending sound of the double bass itself’. Adapted at the request of Peter Herresthal and achieved by what the composer calls ‘flipping the original work upside-down’, the solo violin rising radiantly above the Bergen Philharmonic’s cosmic vistas seems an entirely appropriate, intriguingly different response to the quote. It is somewhat disappointing that instead of the double-bass original Herresthal returns in an alternative arrangement for violin, string quartet and double bass, the consolation being that it may be even more sumptuously ethereal than its own original version.

Mazzoli immerses the listener in all sorts of excellent sounds in her Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres), including a hurdy-gurdy ‘flung into space’, as if the theory of relativity were being applied to music. There is a sense of personal pride in These Worlds in Us, a tribute to the composer’s father, and Herresthal stars again in Vespers, the absorbing tour de force for violin and electronics that was nominated in 2019 for a Grammy Award as Best Classical Composition.

The Arctic Philharmonic move Mazzoli’s blocks of imagination with wonderful balletic grace through the 16-minute frieze of Orpheus in the immediate aftermath of Eurydice’s death, an orchestral suite commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with obvious origins in a ballet Mazzoli created for the National Ballet of Canada in 2019.