Grammy Award-Winning Boston Modern Orchestra Project Releases Album of John Corigliano Works

Boston, MA (For Release 07.18.22) — Known as the nation’s foremost label launched by an orchestra and devoted exclusively to new music, Grammy Award-winning BMOP/sound today announced its latest release, John Corigliano: To Music. Comprising three substantial scores from the 1990s­—To Music, Troubadours (a guitar concerto featuring Eliot Fisk), and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Symphony No. 2—this CD underscores the composer’s stature as a modern master. Produced by Artistic Director and Conductor Gil Rose and performed by his 25-year-old Boston Modern Orchestra Project, the album celebrates Corigliano’s rich, unusual, and widely celebrated work solidifying the composer’s legacy as one of the most significant figures in the landscape of American music.

“John Corigliano is one of the most important orchestral composers of our time,” says Gil Rose. Corigliano's scores, now numbering over 100, have won the Pulitzer Prize, the Grawemeyer Award, five Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, and have been performed and recorded by many of the most prominent orchestras, soloists, and chamber musicians in the world. “The depth and breadth of his extraordinary imagination is a national treasure. BMOP is delighted and fortunate to broadcast Corigliano’s unique and unmistakable musical language.”

The eponymous track is a short, lyrical, and introspective piece originally written for double brass quintets based on Schubert’s An die Musik. The composer explains: “The orchestra plays a long choral-like passage, answered by short fanfare elements…the ensemble builds to a peak before resolving into a gentle setting of Schubert’s masterly song An die Musik (hence the title of the work), from which all the earlier fanfare elements were taken.”

Inspired by the courtly love tradition of the medieval French troubadours, Troubadours is a lyrical concerto performed in three parts of free variations on an original troubadour-like melody. According to John Corigliano, writing this guitar concerto was “like a nostalgic return to all the feelings I had when I started composing—a time when discovery and optimistic enthusiasm ruled my senses. Lyrical, direct, and introspective, the guitar has a natural innocence.” Following its 2019 Boston premiere by BMOP, The Wall Street Journal hailed solo guitarist Eliot Fisk for his “agility and diamond-sharp precision…and warmth and suppleness.”

The album culminates with the winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in Music Award: Symphony No. 2. A significant addition to the modern string orchestra repertory, Symphony No. 2 is a rethinking and expansion of Corigliano’s surreal and virtuosic String Quartet (1995). The Boston Globe raved: “It is a work of great complexity, but it also communicates primal force of feeling. The details spin out into astounding arabesques of elaboration, but the basic architecture is strong, striking, and always in perspective. The piece is an amazing adventure in sound.”

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