Boston Modern Orchestra Project to End Season with Free Concert of World Premieres

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project will conclude its 28th season with a free concert at New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall, Saturday, May 4, 2025, at 3:00 p.m. Celebrating the versatility of the orchestra, BMOP and its  GRAMMY Award-Winning Conductor and Artistic Director Gil Rose, present three virtuosic works by composers Chris Theofanidis, Han Lash, and Jeremy Gill—each concerned with evoking images, memories, feelings, moods.

The program opens with the world premiere of Jeremy Gill’s Four Legends from the Silmarillion, a set of four tone poems that musically depicts the most famous characters from J.R.R. Tolkienʼs posthumously published The Silmarillion. Gill takes listeners into the pre–Hobbitt world of middle earth, where there lies a mythological labyrinth of history, society, and power. According to Gill, Four Legends from the Silmarillion sojourns, in the vehicle of the symphonic tone poem, through a sprawling epic that spans from the unseen deeps of the ocean to “the uttermost rim of the world,” from the ultimate future to the “place among the stars… before the Earth was created.”

Another BMOP-commissioned premiere is Zero Turning Radius by composer Han Lashwhose music has been hailed by The New York Times as “striking and resourceful . . . handsomely brooding.” Corroborating the orchestra’s relevance, Lash describes Zero Turning Radius as “a prayer sent out to the future that the orchestra – such a beautiful, multi-limbed, amphibious creature – can be a playground in contexts and for kinds of music that remain yet unimagined and can be created in any number of different ways.”

Exemplifying his complete mastery of orchestration is Chris Theofanidis’s This Dream, strange and moving (1995). According to Theofanidis, “writing a piece of music is like creating a dream that you want to have. The feeling that pervades the work is one of a sense of mystery, and this sentiment is primarily conveyed through the harmonies and orchestration.” Theofanidis is currently a professor and chair of composition at Yale University, and composer-in-residence and co-director of the composition program at the Aspen Music Festival.

About Gil Rose       

Gil Rose is one of today’s most trailblazing conductors, praised as “amazingly versatile” (The Boston Globe) with “a sense of style and sophistication” (Opera News). Equally at home performing core repertoire, new music, and lesser-known historic symphonic and operative works, “Gil Rose is not just a fine conductor, but a peerless curator, sniffing out—and commissioning—off-trend, unheralded, and otherwise underplayed repertoire, that nevertheless holds to unfailingly high standards of quality. In doing so, he’s built an indefinable, but unmistakable, personal aesthetic” (WQXR). A global leader in American contemporary music, Grammy Award-winner Rose is the founder of the performing and recording ensemble the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), who “bring an endlessly curious and almost archaeological mind to programming…with each concert, each recording, an essential step in a better direction” (The New York Times), as well as the founder of Odyssey Opera, praised by The New York Times as “bold and intriguing.” GilRoseConductor.com

About BMOP     

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) is the premier orchestra in the United States dedicated exclusively to commissioning, performing, and recording music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A unique institution of crucial artistic importance to today’s musical world, BMOP exists to disseminate exceptional orchestral music of the present and recent past via performances and recordings of the highest caliber. Founded by Artistic Director Gil Rose in 1996, BMOP has championed composers whose careers span nine decades. Each season, Rose brings BMOP’s award-winning orchestra, renowned soloists, and influential composers to the stage of New England Conservatory’s historic Jordan Hall in a series that offers orchestral programming of unrivaled eclecticism. Musical America’s 2016 Ensemble of the Year, BMOP was awarded the 2021 Special Achievement Award from Gramophone Magazine as “an organization that has championed American music of the 20th and 21st century with passion and panache.” The musicians of BMOP are consistently lauded for the energy, imagination, and passion with which they infuse the music of the present era. BMOP.org.