Gil Rose on the Boston Modern Orchestra Project

Founded in 1996 by the intrepid Pittsburgh-born conductor Gil Rose, the Boston Modern Opera Project is dedicated to commissioning, performing and recording American music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with recent projects including the world premiere recordings of Mark Adamo's Lysistrata (in collaboration with Pentatone) and albums devoted to the music of Lukas Foss, John Alden Carpenter, Tobias Picker and Dominick Argento (all on their in-house label BMOP/sound, of which Rose is Executive Producer). 

We're thrilled to announce that Presto Music is now the exclusive European physical distributor for BMOP/sound recordings; to mark the beginning of our new partnership, Maestro Rose sat down with Katherine to discuss the label's mission and select some personal highlights from their extensive catalogue (which now runs to over a hundred recordings).

What was the impetus for founding BMOP?

Even as a kid I was intrigued by how much American music has fallen by the wayside because it passed through the system very quickly. In America we’re fascinated with things of the distant past and things of the here-and-now, but the recent past gets far less attention. In the UK there seems to be a collective dedication to filling in the missing parts, whereas over here we’re very quick to move onto the next thing – we often chase shiny objects, and a lot of compelling music has been discarded as a result. 

Many of the composers who attracted me seem to have been cast aside because they didn’t follow whatever style was in vogue at the time – people who didn’t embrace Avant-Gardism or Serialism or Neo-Romanticism when that was flavour of the month. If you look at the Pulitzer Prize winners, a lot of those works still don’t exist on record, or have only been recorded very recently - Douglas Moore’s Giants in the Earth is a real good example - and if we learn more about these pieces we might start to get more of a sense of continuity in American music. We don’t have an equivalent to Verdi or Wagner in our canon: we start with people like Edward MacDowell and John Knowles Paine (or Stephen Foster, if we go back a bit further), then we skip on through to Charles Ives and miss a lot of stops along the way. That’s why this labour of love has been going on for thirty years!

You mention Verdi and Wagner - has opera been a particular casualty?

The ground is littered with American composers who failed at their first opera attempt. Second performances are crucial: some of these operas weren’t perfect at their premiere and needed a bit of revision, but so did Luisa Miller and Simon Boccanegra! American opera companies are very risk-averse in these tough economic times, especially since the pandemic: there’s no margin for error, because if they deliver a turkey it can be real damaging. They play things safer and safer - and although there are deep structural problems at work, I’m doing what I can do to reverse that.

Did you find that record-labels were similarly risk-averse when you were starting out?

It wasn’t that labels were unwilling to take on the risk - it was that most people wouldn’t even answer my calls! We did a couple of releases for Naxos, New World and Chandos early on, then I realised that we were doing so much legwork that we may as well start our own label: we were already deciding the repertoire, covering all the costs and sometimes selecting the cover-art and editing the liner-notes, so all we were missing were a UPC code and a logo! Essentially my ambition was bigger than existing labels would allow, so we struck out on our own - although we’re still happily doing things for other labels (like the recent recording of Mark Adamo’s Lysistrata for Pentatone).

On a personal and selfish note, it means that I can do something that nobody else is doing and feel like I’m adding genuine value to a field that’s given so much to me. The world isn’t going to be changed by me putting my stamp on the Beethoven symphonies – I think I do a pretty good Eroica, but there are a few pretty good recordings out there already! 

Which recordings in the BMOP catalogue were particularly special for you?

We got off the ground with a big gesture.The first thing we released was a full-length ballet by John Harbison (another Pulitzer winner) from the early 1970s: it’s in two acts, ‘Ulysses’s Raft’ and ‘Ulysses’s Bow’, and ‘Raft’ had never been recorded. At that point it had only received one performance, and I don’t think the piece has ever been danced. 

Another milestone was the first recording of the original version of George Antheil’s Ballet mécanique, one of those storied pieces which caused a riot at its premiere! After The Rite of Spring and Salome, you had various composers jostling to get to the top of the ‘Bad Boy Heap’ – Shostakovich with The Nose, Weill with Jonny spielt auf, all these guys trying to be more audacious than the last.

The Ballet mécanique is part of the vogue for industrial workers’ music that flourished in the 1920s and 30s: Antheil brings in coordinated player pianos, airplane propellers, the lot! The problem with player pianos back then was that the mechanisms were slightly off, so if you started them all at the same time it would descend into chaos within about four minutes! Antheil had to scale back the numbers after the premiere to work around that, but once digital keyboards came in it was possible to coordinate 64 pianos through midi if you wanted. 

Paul D. Lehrman (who did a doctoral dissertation on the piece) reconstructed the original score, which is a 38-minute monstrosity complete with bells and sirens! I think we used twelve electronic player pianos, and it was a sonic spectacular: we developed our sound and engineering to capture this amazing cacophonous thing. It’s very much a wall of sound, but we were still learning: we’d have edited it differently today! 

I’m focusing mainly on orchestral music and opera here, but one of our best-selling recordings is a Lou Harrison piece called La Koro Sutro for a gamelan which we had built to the composer’s specifications – capturing this specialist instrument requiring six to eight layers was another learning curve, and I’m very proud of it.

Jumping back onto the orchestral side, our 43rd release was a double CD of the complete symphonies of Lukas Foss, which is a prime example of what we do. Lukas was one of the most talented and eclectic composers of his generation - a colleague of Bernstein, and a beloved mentor of mine. He was very out there in the 60s and 70s, conducting the Brooklyn and Buffalo Philharmonics at the same time as getting really into experimental free jazz; he also conducted The Grateful Dead’s first concert with an orchestra!

Lukas wrote four symphonies spread out over a long career, and none of them had been recorded…You might listen to No. 1 and think it’s the lost Copland symphony, but then they became much more avant-garde and dissonant. I love them all, especially No. 2 which is based on Bach chorale tunes and dedicated to Albert Schweitzer. 

One of our first CDs was Lukas’s early children's opera Griffelkin, which we recorded for Chandos. Like all good children's opera, it’s really for adults: it’s based on a German folk tale about a devil boy who comes to earth to perform magic tricks and causes havoc!  There was a company called the NBC Opera Theater which televised operas in the 50s: the first one they commissioned was Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors and the second was Griffelkin, so it’s an important milestone.

Zipping forward to 2013, we commissioned and recorded a fifty-minute piece called Play by Andrew Norman, who’s now being championed by the Berlin Philharmonic and other major orchestras but at this point was fairly unknown. I talk about this recording a lot, because it won a GRAMMY and Andrew rocketed to fame on those waves - but at the premiere we had one of our smallest audiences ever, thanks in part to terrible weather! This is a great illustration of why I’m so committed to recording pieces rather than just performing them – only a handful of people would otherwise have heard what The New Yorker later called ‘the most important orchestral piece of the twenty-first century’. 

I must mention David Del Tredici’s Child Alice, which may be the most extravagant thing we’ve recorded. It’s a four-part piece running to almost two-and-a-half hours, and scored for an orchestra of about 100 players: percussion was dripping off the stage! David’s been fascinated by Alice in Wonderland for most of his life, and this is the biggest of his many pieces on the subject. The first part won the Pulitzer, but the second and fourth had only been performed once and never recorded.

We’ve been nominated for the GRAMMYs many times, but we actually won one for Tobias Picker’s Fantastic Mr Fox, which is a fun piece. I could talk all day about our opera projects, but a few that stand out are Anthony Davis’s X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints In Three Acts, Norman dello Joio’s The Trial at Rouen (another GRAMMY nominee), Charles Wuorinen’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories…we like doing operas!

Last fall we did something I’d wanted to do for twenty years: Dominick Argento’s The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe, another piece which disappeared after being hailed at its premiere. Even though it was only fifty years old, we had to reconstruct it from the raw materials, restoring about a third of the piece that was cut for the premiere.

It was a laborious process, but the work was important to me: Dominick was a friend and mentor, and I think he's the best American composer for the lyric stage. I wish his operas were known in Europe and the UK - his centenary is next year, and I hope there'll be some attention around that. 

Why do you think they aren’t performed more widely?

Partly because they’re so damn hard! They’re incredibly difficult to produce, although the craft in the composition is superb. What marks a great opera for me is something that’s immediately comprehensible on the surface but gradually reveals its complexity once you crack the piece open…Dominick is a textbook example of that: he wrote for the head and heart simultaneously, and was a man of the theatre unlike anyone this country has produced before or since.

Mark Adamo and John Corigliano both share that quality: we did their Lord of Cries two years ago for Pentatone, and just followed up with Mark’s Lysistrata. Both are great composers in their own right (and Mark’s also an amazing librettist), but when they’re paired together it’s dynamite! They both go for the jugular when the right moment comes – the words are immediately understandable, but there’s also much deeper imagery at work.

Our 100th release shone a light on ballets by John Alden Carpenter (1876-1951), who’s virtually unknown in the UK… in fact he’s barely known in the US either these days, although while he was active he was quite famous. There’s a similarity to Charles Ives in that he supported himself in the mercantile business, so he was technically an amateur composer - but when you listen to his music you hear the voice of a consummate professional. A day-job allows composers to keep their real voice, because they aren’t constrained by economic pressures: that’s equally true of Ives and Carpenter. You could imagine some of his pieces working well at a pops concert, but they’re all at the highest level of musicianship.

What’s coming up next for BMOP?

In June 2027 we’ll present another major work by a forgotten American composer who won a Pulitzer – John La Montaine, who was all the rage for a little while. He composed several piano concertos and some music for the Kennedy inauguration, and was all set to be the next Samuel Barber…until he wasn’t! He wrote a work called Be Glad Then America for the bicentennial in 1976, which we’re going to revive and present before 4th July next year. 

It’s probably best described as a pageant; The New York Times thought it was great and the Washington Post covered it, but it sank without trace after three performances at Penn State. I knew about the piece because it was produced by the Boston opera impresario Sarah Caldwell, and I’m also working with Mark Adamo on an opera about her called Sarah in the Theatre.