BMOP/sound, Celebrates 60th Album Release, 'Leon Kirchner: Music for Orchestra'

Known as the nation's foremost label launched by an orchestra and devoted exclusively to new music, BMOP/sound today announced the release of its landmark 60th album, Leon Kirchner: Music for Orchestra. Showcasing a broad range of the great, late American composer's career, the album marks the only recording of Kirchner's complete orchestral music. Led by conductor Gil Rose and performed by the intrepid musicians of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), the recording spans over 50 years of Kirchner's life, offering superb insights into the composer and his art.

"Leon Kirchner was a gifted pianist and conductor, but was best known as a composer," explains Gil Rose, BMOP/sound's Executive Producer. "This recording is a fascinating glimpse into Kirchner as a technical and formal master whose musical voice remained remarkably distinctive. It is fitting for BMOP/sound's 60th album to spotlight someone who left a multifaceted and influential legacy on American music."

Presented in chronological order, Leon Kirchner: Music for Orchestra consists of five works, beginning with Sinfonia in Two Parts, premiered in 1951 by the New York Philharmonic, and ending with the short but forceful piece The Forbidden, premiered in 2008 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Filling out the disc are Toccata for Strings, Solo Winds, and Percussion (1955) and Music for Orchestra (1969) and Orchestra Piece (Music for Orchestra II) (1990).

A student of Ernest Bloch, Roger Sessions, and Arnold Schoenberg, Kirchner was a fiercely independent composer who never adopted the 12-tone technique although his music was rigorously chromatic and atonal. This is evident in the Toccata, where Kirchner's muscular, post-Schoenberg atonality is on full display. Music for Orchestra is a pithy, pungent, and superbly constructed miniature concerto for orchestra. This hauntingly beautiful piece was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic to celebrate its 125th anniversary. 11 years later Kirchner completed Orchestra Piece (Music for Orchestra II), a colorful work that echoes music of Stravinsky and Schoenberg in its fiery and unrestrained implementation of brass, percussion, and strings.

BMOP/sound Landmark 60th

"BMOP/sound is a labor of love," says Rose. "When I look at the 60 recordings in our catalog, I know we are creating a unique and indispensable legacy. What could be more worth both the labor and the love than that?"

"For the first two decades of the 21st century BMOP has been one of the dominant forces in programming and recording new and neglected modern American concert music, with BMOP/sound offering a wealth of releases consistently notable for the scope and daring of the repertoire, the superior expertise and polish of the performances, and the strict adherence to the highest standards of sonic accuracy. Much of the music on BMOP/sound is packed with intricate and novel instrumental pyrotechnics, and to hear the modern symphonic orchestra in its full splendor, rendered with a rich, vivid presentation that conveys all the detail, dynamic range, timbral subtleties, and acoustic space, is quite simply stunning." (Audiophile Magazine)

About BMOP/sound

BMOP/sound, BMOP's independent record label, was created in 2008 to provide a platform for BMOP's extensive archive of music, as well as to provide widespread, top-quality, permanent access to both classics of the 20th century and the music of today's most innovative composers. BMOP/sound has garnered praise from the national and international press; it is the recipient of six Grammy Award nominations and its releases have appeared on the year-end "Best of" lists of The New York Times, The Boston Globe, National Public Radio, Time Out New York, American Record Guide, DownBeat Magazine, WBUR, NewMusicBox, and others. Admired, praised, and sought after by artists, presenters, critics, and audiophiles, BMOP and BMOP/sound are uniquely positioned to redefine the new music concert and recording experience. BMOPsound.org

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