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BOSTON, MA (For Release 09.29.25) — The Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), the nation’s premier orchestra dedicated exclusively to commissioning, performing, and recording new orchestral music, kickstarts its 29th season with BANG THE DRUM: a one-night only orchestral concert at New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall, Saturday, November 1, 2025, at 8:00 p.m. Celebrating the versatility of percussion instruments, BMOP and its Grammy Award-Winning Conductor and Artistic Director Gil Rose present three virtuosic works showcasing the vast and imaginative sonic possibilities of percussion.
The program opens with the bright and playful percussion quartet STUDY No. 1 (2023) by one of today’s leading female artists, the Grammy Award-winning composer Jessie Montgomery (b.1981). Inspired by marching band cadences and the West African “talking drum”, STUDY No. 1 explores a wide range of timbres and various types of pitch bending and speech-like rhythmic patterns. Acclaimed for her compositions that are “turbulent, wildly colorful and exploding with life” (Washington Post), Montgomery is the recipient of the ASCAP Foundation’s Leonard Bernstein Award and the Sphinx Medal of Excellence.
Grammy Award-winning composer Richard Danielpour (b.1956) has established himself as one of the most sought-after composers of his generation. His Celestial Circus (2013) is a 25-minute suite composed for two pianos and three percussionists that uses electrifying, inventive effects to showcase the spectacular deftness and multifarious sounds of the percussion. Featuring a trio of drumming masters, this compelling work requires precise coordination “among the three as they pass moving figures to one another, and the xylophonist is frequently asked to double the first piano” (New York Classical Review).
2025 marks the centennial of Gunther Schuller’s birth (1925-2015). Ranking among the most eclectic of his generation or any other, Schuller was a composer, conductor, jazz and classical performer, author/historian, music publisher, record producer, and creator of a revolutionary, hybrid style known as “Third Stream.”Schuller served as President of the New England Conservatory, where he established a successful degree-granting jazz program, from 1967-1977. He was the winner of several major honors including the MacArthur Genius Award, DownBeat Lifetime Achievement Award, a Pulitzer Prize, two Grammy Awards, and inaugural membership in the American Classical Music Hall of Fame.
“There was no more prodigious and passionate master of the musical 20th century in America than Gunther Schuller. He was American music-making at its best. To commemorate his centennial, we recognize and celebrate the indelible mark he left on American music.” – GIL ROSE
To celebrate Schuller’s centennial, BMOP presents his sole work for percussion ensemble, Grand Concerto for Percussion and Keyboards (2005). Known for its extensive use of both pitched (such as the marimba and vibraphone) and non-pitched percussion (such as drums, cymbals, and a wind machine), the four-movement Grand Concerto was written for eight percussionists, harp, cello and ensemble and premiered by the New England Conservatory Percussion Ensemble in 2005. According to Schuller, the idea of writing for a lot of percussion with their almost limitless sound and textural possibilities really turned him on.
“Writing this piece was like enjoying a tremendous gourmet feast. Or to put it another way, I felt like a little four-year old splashing wildly around in a big bathtub with dozens of plastic or rubber toys. My imagination was constantly fired with the excitement of talking all those hundred-instrument sounds, like a chef’s ingredients, and mixing, collecting, combining – and/or featuring – in a seemingly limitless, inexhaustible variety.” – GUNTHER SCHULLER
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
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 21stcentury 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.
Ticketing Program Information:
Saturday, November 1, 2025, at 8:00 p.m. ET
New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall, 30 Gainsborough Street, Boston, MA
Tickets: General $10 . Reservations strongly encouraged. To reserve, visit BMOP.org or call 718.324.0396.
Performers:
Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP)
Aaron Likness, piano
Yoko Hagino, piano
Lisa Pegher, percussion
Robert Schulz, percussion
Nick Tolle, percussion
Craig McNutt, percussion
Matt Sharrock, percussion
Mike Williams, percussion
Bill Manley, percussion
Jonathan Hess, percussion
Gil Rose, conductor
Program:
Jessie Montgomery, Study No 1 for percussion quartet (2023)
Richard Danielpour, Celestial Circus (2013) Boston premiere
Gunther Schuller, Grand Concerto for Percussion and Keyboards (2005)
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