DYLAN MATTINGLY - The Wild Heart

Precocious talent is often a cage of definitions, but in the case of Dylan Mattingly, the child-prodigy label—a cello in his hands at five and his first composition at seven—proves decidedly too small a fit.
The American musician, trained at Bard College's conservatory in New York, has managed to graft his creative urgency onto a deep and unusual devotion to Greek and Latin literature. This isn't an academic quirk, but rather the lifeblood feeding his vision: an ideal bridge between the rigor of ancient myth and the structures of contemporary music. It's this intellectual and emotional density that has bewitched a master like John Adams, who has described Mattingly's work as an ecstatic experience, capable of leaving a sonic trail even in the silence that inherits its ending.

This prestigious endorsement gave rise to a partnership with the historic label Nonesuch and the debut of “The Wild Heart”: a monumental fragment of a six-hour opera dedicated to Charles Darwin, here distilled into an hour and fifteen minutes of pure acoustic trance. Conducted by David Bloom and performed by the ensemble Contemporaneous, “The Wild Heart” focuses attention on two sections of the opera: “The Transmutation Notebooks” and “Sunt Lacrimae Rerum (These Are The Tears Of Things)”, running an hour and fifteen minutes on the CD edition and trimmed to forty minutes on vinyl.
If you're expecting yet another predictable heir to Steve Reich or Philip Glass, it won't take much to change your mind. The frantic cascade of piano and violin notes in “Ulysses Dances” stands out as one of the most vibrant and original scores of the past decade: a web of powerful string interplay, where driving piano cells are absorbed by the scrapes of violin and other stringed instruments, but also a weave of crystalline reverberations that set the tone for baroque, exuberant melodies capable of blossoming into an ecstatic folk-rock dance. Simply astounding.

With the second movement, “Notes For Another Life”, the aesthetic coordinates shift radically. The track brings in the magnetic voice of Iarla Ó Lionáird (Afro Celt Sound System and The Gloaming), which settles over the flowing notes of a harp running like a murky yet mesmerizing river: at this point, enchantment is inevitable.
The emotional and spiritual intensity climbs even higher in the long, meditative piano geometries of “The History Of Life In Reverse”. Mattingly soaks up disparate musical traditions like a sponge, folding them into a kaleidoscopic sonic whole where music becomes word in the energetic pagan dance of “Last Dance”, an image amid the reverberations of “Past Ithaca” and, finally, utopia.

The closing seventeen minutes belong to the project's second chapter, “Sunt Lacrimae Rerum (These Are The Tears Of Things)”, a track explicitly inspired by the darkest, most anguished pages of Virgil's Aeneid. Here a whirlwind of enchanting minimal chords unleashes and builds steadily, reaching for celestial tones that hover in the air like doves following the tolling of bells. These are notes that flow like tears, which, gathering drop by drop in the palm of a hand, flood the soul and, with quiet melancholy, guide the listener toward the ending.
But the farewell is only apparent: luckily for us, this extraordinary sonic journey is only just beginning.

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04/08/2026