Vigorous BMOP romps through Adams symphonies and more

For its season-opening concert, “Virtuosity’s Velocity,” the Boston Modern Orchestra Project trained its sights on the chamber orchestra — an ensemble whose unique flexibility can incorporate the weight and timbral range of the orchestra and the responsiveness of chamber music. All the music was American, creating a sort of microhistory of the genre’s many iterations.

Media Date 
November 15, 2010
Media Source 
The Boston Globe
Media 
Media Quote 

This is zany, infectious, and altogether fun music.

Media Contact Name 
David Weininger
Media Contact Title 
Globe Staff

All-American electricity

For its seasonal opener “Virtuosity’s Velocity,” on Saturday, November 13 at Jordan Hall, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project chose to present an all-American program in a chamber-orchestra size. (In the old days, there were more players on stage than audience members.) The program included works by John Coolidge Adams, Arthur Berger, Ross Lee Finney, and Scott Wheeler. All these composers except Wheeler flirted with serial techniques, only to abandon them later.

Media Date 
November 15, 2010
Media Source 
The Boston Musical Intelligencer
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Media Quote 

The final piece was Adams's Chamber Symphony, and a wonder it was.

Media Contact Name 
Larry Phillips

BMOP has no trouble with multiple double concerti

Virtuosity, in its traditional sense, is musical performance at its most outgoing; the Boston Modern Orchestra Project’s Saturday concert — “Double Trouble,” a quartet of double concerti — revealed a plethora of extroverted strategies. The plurality of styles was a showcase for the flexibility of conductor Gil Rose’s group, switching channels with ease, burnished and rhythmically rigorous in a program marked by wide-ranging gregariousness.

Media Date 
January 24, 2011
Media Source 
The Boston Globe
Media 
Media Quote 

Virtuosity, in its traditional sense, is musical performance at its most outgoing; BMOP's Saturday concert revealed a plethora of extroverted strategies.

Media Contact Name 
Matthew Guerrieri

Women's works illuminated by Boston Modern Orchestra Project

A chamber-size contingent of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and director Gil Rose visited Wellesley College on Saturday (part of a weekend tour that also stopped at Bowdoin College and Tufts University) with an all-female-composer program called “Luminous Noise.” Such a deliberate spotlight is, hopefully, not quite the necessary corrective to a predominantly male compositional culture that it would have been all too recently, but it still invited consideration of what it does — and does not — mean to be a female composer in the world of classical music.

Media Date 
December 13, 2010
Media Source 
The Boston Globe
Media 
Media Quote 

Rose and the players, perpetuating BMOP's high, accomplished standard, were particularly good in this pair, mixing easy virtuosity with bracing charm.

Media Contact Name 
Matthew Guerrieri
Media Contact Title 
Globe Staff

BMOP's Luminous Noise at Wellesley

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Gil Rose, conductor, is in residence this year at Wellesley College and presenting three concerts, of which the first, entitled, “Luminous Noise: Three Women Compose,” was presented on Saturday, December 11, at the Houghton Chapel. The acoustics there have always been excellent — the venue is often used for recording projects — and continue to be so after the recent renovation. This concert was one of three performances of the same program at Bowdoin College and Tufts University on this same weekend.

Media Date 
December 13, 2010
Media Source 
The Boston Musical Intelligencer
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Media Quote 

Stunning in its simplicity and power.

Media Contact Name 
Mary Wallace Davidson

Club BMOP's alternative narratives

Gil Rose presented Boston Modern Opera Project’s first Club Concert of the season on Monday evening, November 29. These evenings, which began at the Club Café in Boston in 2003 and this year moved to the Oberon in Cambridge, are hosted by BMOP’s Score Board (New England composers) whose members take turns “curating.” On this occasion it was Curtis K. Hughes who introduced each work, with pianist Sarah Bob introducing Hughes’s own composition.

Media Date 
December 2, 2010
Media Source 
The Boston Musical Intelligencer
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Media Quote 

Altogether a rich and engaging work I’d like to hear again.

Media Contact Name 
Mary Wallace Davidson

More from the Voice of America

I’ve been slow to post my thoughts on the second half of the “Voice of America” concert I heard last Friday, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t enthusiastic about it. Indeed, this was probably the most rewarding Boston Modern Orchestra Project concert I’ve yet heard. Although I confess I don’t often hear this group; to me, there’s sometimes a problem built right into their concerts - they’re funded by the composers being played. I don’t mean to criticize this as a way of getting new music out before the public, and to be honest, what I’ve heard at BMOP has always been highly accomplished.

Media Date 
September 29, 2009
Media Source 
The Hub Review
Media 
Media Quote 

What I’ve heard at BMOP has always been highly accomplished.

Media Contact Name 
Thomas Garvey

Florestan, BMOP offer sublime tribute to vocal music

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project had a good idea last weekend. They paired with the Florestan Project, a superb vocal group, to present three days of concerts named “Voice of America” at Tufts University’s Distler Performance Hall. Florestan presented the complete songs of Samuel Barber, some 75 in number. The Sunday afternoon concert I attended then featured a chamber-music-sized BMOP with concerted songs of Samuel Barber and Virgil Thomson. Florestan and BMOP together offered a sublime tribute to the voice.

Media Date 
September 29, 2009
Media Source 
The Boston Musical Intelligencer
Media 
Media Quote 

No one can forget the last song's "ah, to be all alone."

Media Contact Name 
Larry Phillips

The Barber songbook

Samuel Barber (near left, with his lover Gian Carlo Menotti) once described himself as “a living dead composer,” and indeed, for most his life his commitment to romantic feeling in the modern age consigned him to the dustbin of critical opinion. But history has a way of upending that dustbin, and Barber’s gift for lyrical simplicity, cemented in the popular mind by his Adagio for Strings, has enabled him to outlast his detractors.

Media Date 
September 27, 2009
Media Source 
The Hub Review
Media 
Media Quote 

The central thread in the concert was a deep yet somehow luminous sense of melancholy

Media Contact Name 
Thomas Garvey

Kicking off a vocal fest at Tufts

The conductor Gil Rose, after curating last year’s Ditson Festival of Contemporary Music, is admirably keeping alive the vision of a local new-music festival in late September. This year’s iteration, entitled “Voice of America,” is underway at Tufts University’s Granoff Music Center. It does not have the Ditson Fund’s generous backing so it paints on a necessarily smaller canvas, but last night’s opening performances made clear that it should be a richly rewarding weekend of American vocal music.

Media Date 
September 26, 2009
Media Source 
The Boston Globe
Media 
Media Quote 

It was a particular pleasure to hear these art songs presented.

Media Contact Name 
Jeremy Eichler

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