BMOP/sound Releases Album of Roger Reynolds's Violin Works

Roger Reynolds: Violin Works (#1086)

Composer: Roger Reynolds (b.1934)

Release Date: April 12, 2022

TRT: 83:25

Works: Personae (1989-90), Kokoro (1991-92), Aspiration (2004-05)

Performers: Gabriela Díaz (violin) and Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) led by Gil Rose (conductor)   

Boston, MA (For Release 04.12.22) — Known as the nation’s foremost label launched by an orchestra and devoted exclusively to new music, Grammy Award-winning BMOP/sound today announced the release of Roger Reynolds: Violin Works. Showcasing the composer’s omnivorous curiosity, the album comprises three violin concertos written over a 15-year span. A Pulitzer Prize winner who pioneered sound spatialization, intermedia, and algorithmic concepts, Reynolds documents his evolving exploration of the voice, character, and circumstance through the inimitable violin. Conductor Gil Rose and his 25-year-old Boston Modern Orchestra Project are joined by the radiant sound of violinist Gabriela Díaz. 

“The violin has a multifaceted voice,” explains Roger Reynolds, an American composer who has lived and worked in California since the 1970s. “It is closest, instrumentally, to what a human vocalist can manage: in the articulate delivery of what feels like ‘messages’.”

While Reynolds was a visiting professor at Harvard in 2012, he worked closely with contemporary-music champion and long-time BMOP violinist Gabriela Díaz. Attracted to her warmth, musicality, luminosity, and freshness, Reynolds hails her “open and relaxed approach…and projects the variable worlds of expression and sincerity that exist in these pieces. Everything sings.” 

The album opens with the continuous 26-minute work Personae with both orchestra and computer tape shadowing the violin. Diaz takes on four roles: The Conjurer, The Dancer, The Meditator, and The Advocate. Each of the four presentations’ most direct shadows are heard from the ensemble, the more impressionistic ones in the computer’s realm. In contrast to Personae, the purely acoustic Aspiration allows the chamber ensemble to play a more essential, not ornamental role. In the middle is the Zen-inspired Kokoro, for solo violin, designed to challenge the soloist to assume “an entirely new psychological stance” for each of the work’s 12 sections.

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 a 2020 Grammy Award for Tobias Picker: Fantastic Mr. Fox as well as eight 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, 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. Launched in 2019, BMOP's digital radio station, BMOP/radio, streams BMOP/sound's entire catalog and airs special programming. BMOP.org