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Press Releases
Grammy Award-Winning BMOP/sound Releases Premiere Recording of Acclaimed Opera Tobias Picker: Awakenings (#1094)
Performances by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) and Odyssey Opera Led by Conductor Gil Rose, Singers Jarrett Porter, Joyce El-Khoury, Adrienne Danrich, and More
PHYSICAL RELEASE
October 2023
Available at BMOP.org
DIGITAL RELEASE
September 15, 2023
Available at BandCamp
BOSTON, MA (For Release 09.15.23) — Approaching its landmark 100th album, BMOP/sound today released Tobias Picker: Awakenings, the highly anticipated world premiere studio recording of Tobias Picker and Aryeh Lev Stollman’s operatic retelling of the 1973 bestseller by Dr. Oliver Sacks. At the helm of conductor Gil Rose are sterling performances by two of the nation’s leading contemporary ensembles: Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) and Odyssey Opera. Baritone Jarrett Porter plays the lead role of Oliver Sacks, alongside a cast including sopranos Joyce El-Khoury and Adrienne Danrich.
Set primarily in a Bronx hospital from 1966 to the end of 1969, Awakenings tells the true story of the eminent neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks, who received worldwide acclaim for awakening survivors of the “sleeping-sickness” epidemic of the 1920s from their decades-long, frozen-like state to a new chance at an active life with the drug L-DOPA. Sacks’s work inspired several adaptations for the stage and screen, including the 1990 Oscar-nominated film “Awakenings”.
About 25 years ago, Picker acquired the stage rights to the book. Picker and Stollman (partners of 43 years), had the challenging task of turning Sacks’s nonfiction book, a collection of case histories and essays, into an opera. Awakenings first took musical form as a ballet score, commissioned by England’s Rambert Dance Company, which toured throughout the UK during the 2010-11 season with some 80 performances. After a two-year delay caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Awakenings, commissioned by Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, premiered June 2022.
The project is of personal importance for Picker –– he has said his friend Dr. Sacks “freed” him from the shame he once felt over his Tourette’s Syndrome. Months before Sacks’s death in 2015 at the age of 82, he revealed publicly and with pride that he was gay. This sensitive operatic adaptation by two of Sacks’s longtime friends—Picker and Stollman—is the first to portray him, accurately, as a gay man.
A renowned composer of all genres, performed by major orchestras and concert soloists throughout the world, Tobias Picker—called “the finest composer for the lyric stage” by The Wall Street Journal—began his opera career with Emmeline (1996) commissioned by Santa Fe Opera, followed by Fantastic Mr. Fox, Thérèse Raquin, An American Tragedy, and Dolores Claiborne, which premiered at the LA Opera, Dallas Opera, Metropolitan Opera, and San Francisco Opera respectively—have received widespread recognition and multiple new productions. Librettist Aryeh Lev Stollman is the Lambda Literary Award-winning author of the novel The Far Euphrates (Riverhead), and a neuroradiologist at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.
Odyssey Opera and BMOP have performed Picker’s music for almost a decade. Its 2014 co-production of the family opera Fantastic Mr. Fox was hailed by WBUR Radio as “utterly delightful” and one of the “High Notes of Classical Music in 2014”. In 2019, BMOP/sound released the opera’s premiere recording Tobias Picker: Fantastic Mr. Fox (#1065), which subsequently won the label’s first Grammy Award for “Best Opera Recording” in 2020. Most recently in February 2023, they presented the East Coast premiere of Awakeningshailed by The Boston Globe as “the stuff of dreams.”
About BMOP
The Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) is the premier orchestra in the United States dedicated exclusively to commissioning, performing, and recording music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A unique institution of crucial artistic importance to today’s musical world, BMOP exists to disseminate exceptional orchestral music of the present and recent past via performances and recordings of the highest caliber. Founded by Artistic Director Gil Rose in 1996, BMOP has championed composers whose careers span nine decades.
Each season, Rose brings BMOP’s award-winning orchestra, renowned soloists, and influential composers to the stage of New England Conservatory’s historic Jordan Hall in a series that offers orchestral programming of unrivaled eclecticism. Musical America’s 2016 Ensemble of the Year, BMOP was awarded the 2021 Special Achievement Award from Gramophone Magazine as “an organization that has championed American music of the 20th and 21st century with passion and panache.” The musicians of BMOP are consistently lauded for the energy, imagination, and passion with which they infuse the music of the present era. BMOP.org
About Odyssey Opera
Founded in 2013 by artistic director/conductor Gil Rose, Odyssey Opera presents adventurous and eclectic works that affirm opera as a powerful expression of the human experience. Hailed by The New York Times as “one of the nation’s most intriguing opera companies,” its world-class artists perform the operatic repertoire from its historic beginnings through lesser-known masterpieces to contemporary new works and commissions in varied formats and venues. Odyssey Opera takes its audience on a journey to places they’ve never been before. OdysseyOpera.org
About Gil Rose
Gil Rose is one of today’s most trailblazing conductors, praised as “amazingly versatile” (The Boston Globe) with “a sense of style and sophistication” (Opera News). Equally at home performing core repertoire, new music, and lesser-known historic symphonic and operative works, “Gil Rose is not just a fine conductor, but a peerless curator, sniffing out—and commissioning—off-trend, unheralded, and otherwise underplayed repertoire, that nevertheless holds to unfailingly high standards of quality. In doing so, he’s built an indefinable, but unmistakable, personal aesthetic” (WQXR).
A global leader in American contemporary music, Grammy Award-winner Rose is the founder of the performing and recording ensemble the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), who “bring an endlessly curious and almost archaeological mind to programming…with each concert, each recording, an essential step in a better direction” (The New York Times), as well as the founder of Odyssey Opera, praised by The New York Times as “bold and intriguing.”
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
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