BMOP/sound Releases Debut Recording of David Del Tredici’s Complete Song Cycle Child Alice

Composer: David Del Tredici (b.1937)

Performers: Courtenay Budd (soprano) and BMOP 

led by Gil Rose?

Release Date: November 14, 2017

TRT: 133:49

Tracks: Child Alice: Part I-  In Memory of a Summer Day, Part II- Quaint Events, Happy Voices & All in the Golden Afternoon

Boston, MA (For Release 11.14.17) — Known as the nation’s foremost label launched by an orchestra and devoted exclusively to new and 20th Century music, BMOP/sound today announced the highly anticipated release of the world premiere recording of the complete version of Child Alice by iconic composer David Del Tredici. This rarely-heard, neo-Romantic masterpiece explores Del Tredici’s Lewis Carroll-inspired fantasy world. This epic work is presented as a 135-minute two-disc hybrid-SACD set. Led by conductor Gil Rose, Child Alice calls for forceful, virtuosic performances by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), featuring soprano Courtenay Budd.

“Ambitious. Overwhelming. Audacious. Everything about this recording is large: the orchestra, the length, and the gesture,” explains Artistic Director and Conductor of BMOP. “Child Alice is the quintessential CD in BMOP/sound’s catalog. It is the perfect example of what BMOP and its label are all about. This is a big way to close 2017 and a thrilling way to approach our upcoming 60th landmark recording.” 

David Del Tredici is perhaps best known for being at the forefront of classical music’s neo-Romantic movement. One summit of that movement is Child Alice—an important turning point in the history of American music. “Child Alice is one of those pieces that comes along every once in a while, and shatters the mold,” says Rose. “It broke a trend by embracing tonality as the central issue to be dealt with. It is a piece that wears many disguises in broad daylight. It appears simple, but is complex both musically and psychologically.”

For over two decades, Del Tredici was focused on crafting music from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland books. His fascination yielded a series of diverse compositions including An Alice Symphony (1969), Adventures Underground (1971), the theatrical, operatic orchestral work Final Alice (1976), and the lush Child Alice (1977-1981), the hugest and most elaborate of his Carroll-inspired settings. Both Final Alice and In Memory of a Summer Day (Part I of Child Alice) generated best-selling recordings; In Memory of a Summer Day won the Pulitzer Prize in music in 1980.

In the years since it was completed, Child Alice has received a total of just two live performances—its premiere in 1986 at Carnegie Hall and, 30 years later, BMOP’s 2016 highly praised performance. According to The Wall Street Journal, it “underscored BMOP’s stature as one of this country’s finest new-music ensembles.” The Boston Globe raved: “Rose, BMOP wax ecstatic in glorious, unsettling ‘Alice’. Joy abounds…in the evident pleasure Del Tredici takes in exploiting an orchestra’s capacity for volume and sensation. Del Tredici is fortunate, as are we listeners, to have an advocate so resourceful, skillful, and determined as Rose.”

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 six 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 Magazine, 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. BMOPsound.org

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