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Press Releases
Gil Rose and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project Release Paul Moravec: The Overlook Hotel Album
PHYSICAL DIGITAL RELEASE
TBR March 5, 2024
Available at BandCamp
Approaching its landmark 100th album, the Grammy Award-winning Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) and Gil Rose present Paul Moravec: The Overlook Hotel on their eponymous label, BMOP/sound. On this new portrait disc Moravec’s prodigious and polystylistic pieces touch upon a diverse panoply of themes and inspirations. With a variety of inspirations including haunting horror, ecological wonder, architectural homage, and career-spanning historical connections, the recording’s four works offer a glimpse into the creative mind of a seasoned composer.
Moravec (b.1957), who teaches at Adelphi University on Long Island and won a Pulitzer Prize in 2004, has written over 200 orchestral, opera, chamber, choral and lyric compositions. This recording marks the third on the BMOP/sound label, the first two being The Blizzard Voices (2017), an oratorio about the Great Blizzard of 1888, and Northern Lights Electric (2012), an album of Moravec’s orchestral music featuring renowned cello soloist Matt Haimovitz.
“I am beyond fortunate to have these four compositions performed and recorded by the world-class players of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project led by Gil Rose. This is my third album with BMOP and I am as grateful as ever for their advocacy, astounding artistry, and generosity of spirit.” - PAUL MORAVEC
Three of the album’s works are musical portraits of structures: the Bradenburg Gate in Berlin, the Great Western Staircase in the New York State Capitol, and the imaginary Overlook Hotel from The Shining. “While the physical structures themselves stand at the heart of their respective compositions, what concerns me above all are the human emotions, thoughts and memories associated with each,” explains Moravec.
“The Overlook Hotel” – The Suite from The Shining (2016) is Moravec’s latest opera and is based on the Stephen King psychological thriller. According to Minnesota Public Radio, it “is a right multi, layered soundscape that breathes life into the Overlook Hotel, which is both the setting and the villain of the piece.”Brandenburg Gate (2008) for chamber orchestra projects a similar quality of energy to Bach’s most joyous Brandenburg concertos. The title, Brandenburg Gate, suggests a portal through which we enter Bach's world of exuberant invention. It also refers to the actual monument in Berlin, which the composer personally associates primarily with the astonishing images of the opening of the Berlin Wall in early November, 1989.Serenade (2004) is an homage to the haunting sculpted faces and figures (both known and unknown) carved into the magnificent Western Staircase of the New York State Capitol Building. Perhaps the most abstract work in this collection is Scorpio Dances (2019), a ballet score commissioned for BalletCollective and choreographed by Preston Chamblee.
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, Grammy Award-winning 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 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.” GilRoseConductor.com
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 nominations, and its releases have appeared on the year-end “Best of” lists of The New York Times, The Boston Globe, National Public Radio, 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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