BMOP/sound Releases Charles Wuorinen: Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Composer: Charles Wuorinen (1938-2020)

Release Date: November 10, 2020

TRT: Disc One: 80:54 Disc Two: 52:35

Work: Haroun and the Sea of Stories (2004)

Performers: Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) and Chorus, Heather Buck (soprano), Stephen Bryant (bass-baritone), Matthew DiBattista (tenor), David Salsbery Fry (bass), Brian Giebler (tenor), Wilbur Pauley (bass), Michelle Trainor (soprano), Neal Ferreira (tenor), Heather Gallagher (mezzo-soprano), Charles Blandy (tenor), Aaron Engebreth (baritone), Thomas Oesterling (tenor), Steven Goldstein (tenor), led by Gil Rose (conductor)

Boston, MA (For Release 11.10.20) — 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 Charles Wuorinen: Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a two-CD set of the composer’s second opera with libretto by James Fenton, based on the sophisticated children’s novel by Salman Rushdie.  Led by Artistic Director and Conductor Gil Rose, the opulent, complex score employs 56 BMOP orchestral players, 13 vocalists including Heather Buck (soprano) in the title role, and 16 choristers.

Charles Wuorinen, winner of the 1970 Pulitzer Prize in Music, died in March 2020 at the age of 81. In 2019, BMOP had the privilege of having the composer in attendance at just the second performance of Haroun and its subsequent recording. According to Gil Rose, Artistic Director, Founder, and Conductor of BMOP, Wuorinen was “not the last of the breed but certainly the most prominent and distinguished advocate of high modernism.” Wuorinen, who completed 279 works, was known for much of his career as an admirer of the 12-tone system of composition. Rose admits that the idea of “a 12-tone children’s opera” might seem daunting, which is why he hopes to “break down the barrier” between the listener and the energy of the story as quickly as possible. “This opera gives people a chance to see Charles’s wit and humor, which in a symphony or string quartet may be more abstracted. I’d love for listeners to go from the beginning, where there’s this wonderful sense of hope and the future, to thinking this is a piece of interest to finally concluding that it’s a piece of vital theater.”

Bombay-born Salman Rushdie (b.1947) completed Haroun and the Sea of Stories in 1990, while in hiding in England under an international assassination-sentence by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini for blasphemy to Islam in the author’s previous book. In a make-believe world, based loosely on Bombay and Kashmir, the story of Haroun is a tale of a fight between the free imagination and the powers that oppose it.  The libretto stays close to the buoyant spirit of the original children’s book, conjuring up a fantasy world, without ever losing Rushdie’s colorful parable of the crucial importance of freedom of speech. The unconventional score of electricity, fright and fancy is described by Wuorinen himself as “typical me, and does not try to be anything non-Western, non-me, or non-American."

The 2004 world premiere by the New York City Opera was cited as “an over-flowing feast of witty, inventive music-theater.” (Opera News) Soprano Heather Buck’s performance was described as a career-breakthrough for her. “Diminutive but friskily all over the stage, she inhabited and enlivened her character and the story, and the music’s high flights fazed her not.” Buck was recently featured on BMOP/sound’s recording of Norman Dello Joio: The Trial at Rouen (Released 09/2020, #1073).

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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