The Boston Modern Orchestra Project Presents Three New Works, 1/17

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), the nation's premier orchestra dedicated exclusively to commissioning, performing, and recording new orchestral music, welcomes the New Year with three premieres by Ken Ueno, Elena Ruehr and David Rakowski. BMOP has performed each composer's music thrice before on the Jordan Hall stage and has recorded multiple albums featuring their work.

"BMOP has a long-standing, fruitful and rewarding relationship with each of these composers," explains Gil Rose, Artistic Director and Conductor of BMOP. "We're honored to be premiering their latest works and so psyched to be kick-starting 2014 with such progressive and playful new music."

Hapax Legomenon, Concerto for two-bow cello by composer/vocalist Ken Ueno is written for the great cello virtuoso Frances-Marie Uitti. It features a technique that she invented that allows her to play all four strings at once; a non-traditional view of virtuosity that is of vertical harmony rather than horizontal speed. "This piece is dedicated to the liminal space between melody and sound, noise and harmony, and between imagined sound and silence," explains Ueno. "The virtuosity is in that fragile delicacy."

The term Hapax Legomenon refers to a word that appears only once in a given context (as in a literary work), and is a poetic analog to Ueno's musical praxis of person-specificity: meant to be, initially, performed by one person. Ueno is the winner of the Rome Prize and Berlin Prize and currently serves as an Associate Professor at UC Berkeley. His influences range from Heavy Metal sub-tone singing and European avant-garde instrumental techniques to American experimentalism and the buzzing sound quality called sawari found in traditional Japanese music.

BMOP is thrilled to welcome back the orchestra's former Composer-in-Residence Elena Ruehr. An award-winning faculty member of MIT, she has also been a fellow at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute. The world premiere of Summer Days marks the third installment of a series of works inspired by the paintings of Georgia O'Keefe. Summer Days is one of O'Keefe's most iconic paintings, and Ruehr successfully captures its grandeur and lyricism. The series' other two pieces, Sky Above Clouds and Ladder to the Moon, were premiered by BMOP while Ruehr was Composer-in-Residence. Ruehr says "the idea is that the surface be simple, the structure complex."

Rounding out the program is the world premiere of Piano Concerto No. 2 (2011) by Boston-based David Rakowski. This is the latest chapter of his ongoing collaboration with pianist Amy Briggs. She recorded three volumes of Rakowski's Piano Etudes on Bridge Records to much critical acclaim, and will record a fourth volume in June 2014. Rakowski is the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters award and currently serves as Professor of Composition at Brandeis University.

About BMOP:

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) is widely recognized as the leading orchestra in the United States dedicated exclusively to performing new music, and its signature record label, BMOP/sound, is the nation's foremost label launched by an orchestra and solely devoted to new music recordings. Founded in 1996 by Artistic Director Gil Rose, BMOP affirms its mission to illuminate the connections that exist naturally between contemporary music and contemporary society by reuniting composers and audiences in a shared concert experience.

In its first 12 seasons, BMOP established a track record that includes more than 80 performances, over 70 world premieres (including 30 commissioned works), two Opera Unlimited festivals with Opera Boston, the inaugural Ditson Festival of Contemporary Music with the ICA/Boston, and 32 commercial recordings, including 12 CDs from BMOP/sound.

In March 2008, BMOP launched its signature record label, BMOP/sound, with the release of John Harbison's ballet Ulysses. Its composer-centric releases focus on orchestral works that are otherwise unavailable in recorded form. The response to the label was immediate and celebratory; its five inaugural releases appeared on the "Best of 2008" lists of the New York Times, Boston Globe, National Public Radio, Downbeat, and American Record Guide, among others. BMOP/sound is the recipient of five Grammy Award nominations: in 2009 for Charles Fussell: Wilde (Best Classical Vocal Performance); in 2010 for Derek Bermel: Voices (Best Instrumental Soloist Performance with Orchestra); and three nominations in 2011 for its recording of Steven Mackey: Dreamhouse (Best Engineered Classical Album, Best Classical Album, and Best Orchestral Performance). The New York Times has proclaimed, "BMOP/sound is an example of everything done right." Additional BMOP recordings are available from Albany, Arsis, Cantaloupe, Centaur, Chandos, ECM, Innova, Naxos, New World, and Oxingale.

In Boston, BMOP performs at Jordan Hall and Symphony Hall, and the orchestra has also performed in New York at Miller Theater, the Winter Garden, Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, and The Lyceum in Brooklyn. A perennial winner of the ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming of Orchestral Music and 2006 winner of the John S. Edwards Award for Strongest Commitment to New American Music, BMOP has appeared at the Bank of America Celebrity Series (Boston, MA), Tanglewood, the Boston Cyberarts Festival, the Festival of New American Music (Sacramento, CA), and Music on the Edge (Pittsburgh, PA). In April 2008, BMOP headlined the 10th Annual MATA Festival in New York.

BMOP's greatest strength is the artistic distinction of its musicians and performances. Each season, Gil Rose, recipient of Columbia University's prestigious Ditson Conductor's Award as well as an ASCAP Concert Music award for his extraordinary contribution to new music, gathers together an outstanding orchestra of dynamic and talented young performers, and presents some of the world's top vocal and instrumental soloists. The Boston Globe claims, "Gil Rose is some kind of genius; his concerts are wildly entertaining, intellectually rigorous, and meaningful." Of BMOP performances, the New York Times says: "Mr. Rose and his team filled the music with rich, decisive ensemble colors and magnificent solos. These musicians were rapturous-superb instrumentalists at work and play." http://www.bmop.org

To post a comment, you must register and login.