Gil Rose is the founder and conductor of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), [1] founder and General-Artistic Director of Odyssey Opera, Artistic Director of Monadnock Music Festival, Professor of Practice at Northeastern University, and Executive Producer of the record label "BMOP/sound." [2]
Rose was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and received his Bachelor of Music from the University of Cincinnati – College Conservatory of Music. He later studied at Carnegie Mellon University, where he received his Master of Fine Arts degree and Artist Diploma.[ citation needed ]
Rose founded the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) in 1996 and has since then served as the artistic director of a group lauded as "one of the country's leading contemporary music ensembles." [3] Under Rose's leadership, BMOP has received two John S. Edwards Awards for Strongest Commitment to New American Music and has won eleven ASCAP awards for adventurous orchestral programming. [4] [5] In 2015 it was named Musical America's 2016 Ensemble of the Year. [6] Composer John Harbison has said that "No other city has anything resembling BMOP — with that level of activity, with that sustained productivity ... There's really been no new-music organization with a wider range of inclusion." [1] Paul Griffiths has also praised the ensemble, writing in The New York Times in 2000 that "Mr. Rose and his team filled the music with rich, decisive ensemble colors and magnificent solos ... These musicians were rapturous ... superb instrumentalists at work and play." [7]
Rose founded Odyssey Opera in 2013 in order to bring audiences "on a journey, maybe to ports of call they haven't been to before"; [8] the company has gained an "enthusiastic following" [9] for its productions of rarely performed works under his artistic and musical direction – from large, grand concert operas to fully staged contemporary chamber operas. [10] The inaugural season began with a performance of Wagner's Rienzi, while 2014 saw a "triumphal" [11] concert performance (and Boston premiere) of Korngold's Die tote Stadt . [12] In 2015 the group performed the "enthusiastically cheered" [13] Boston premiere of Massenet's "Le Cid" under Rose's baton at the New England Conservatory of Music's Jordan Hall. [14] [15]
From 2003 to its closure in 2012, Rose served as the artistic director of Opera Boston. His performances with the ensemble included Verdi's Luisa Miller , Beethoven's Fidelio , [16] John Adams's Nixon in China, Gluck's Alceste (featuring Dawn Upshaw), Shostakovich's The Nose, Weber's Der Freischütz , Smetana's The Bartered Bride , Rossini's Tancredi (featuring Ewa Podleś), and the world premiere of Madame White Snake (with music by Zhou Long).
Rose has curated the Fromm Concert Series at Harvard University and served as the Artistic Director of the 2008 Ditson Festival of Contemporary Music at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. [17] He also directed the Voice of America Festival, a six-concert, three-day event, featuring BMOP in partnership with the Florestan Recital Project and the Tufts University Department of Music.
Rose has also made numerous appearances as a guest conductor, including with the American Composers Orchestra, the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana and the National Orchestra of Porto, as well as several appearances with the Boston Symphony Chamber Players. He made his Tanglewood Music Festival debut in 2002 and in 2003 he debuted with the Netherlands Radio Symphony as part of the Holland Festival. [18]
From 2003 to 2006, he was the artistic director of the Opera Unlimited Festival, a collaboration between BMOP and Opera Boston resulting in staged contemporary chamber operas. He led world premieres of Elena Ruehr's Toussaint Before the Spirits, the New England premiere of Thomas Adès's Powder Her Face , and John Harbison's Full Moon in March. In 2006 he conducted an acclaimed North American premiere of Peter Eötvös's Angels in America with Opera Unlimited. [19]
As an educator, Rose was the director of Orchestral Activities at Tufts University for five years. In 2013, he joined the faculty of Northeastern University as a Professor of Practice of Music. [20]
Rose conducted performances of Death and the Powers, an opera by Tod Machover featuring new performance technologies developed by the MIT Media Lab, in collaboration with the American Repertory Theater. The world premiere took place at the Grimaldi Forum Monaco in Monte Carlo, Monaco in September 2010. The North American premiere took place in Boston with the American Repertory Theater in 2011, followed by a performance at the Chicago Opera Theater later that year. [21]
Rose serves as executive producer of BMOP/sound, a recipient of 2009, 2010, and 2011 Grammy Award nomations. He is also a recipient of an ASCAP Concert Music award and in 2007, received Columbia University's Ditson Conductor's Award for his commitment to the performance of American music. His recordings have appeared on the year-end "Best of" lists of The New York Times , Time Out New York , The Boston Globe , Chicago Tribune , American Record Guide , National Public Radio, and Downbeat Magazine. [22] [23]
Thomas Joseph Edmund Adès is a British composer, pianist and conductor. Five compositions by Adès received votes in the 2017 Classic Voice poll of the greatest works of art music since 2000: The Tempest (2004), Violin Concerto (2005), Tevot (2007), In Seven Days (2008), and Polaris (2010).
Steven Edward Stucky was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer.
The Louisville Orchestra is the primary orchestra in Louisville, Kentucky. It was founded in 1937 by Robert Whitney (1904–1986). The Louisville Orchestra employs salaried musicians, and offers a wide variety of concert series to the community, including classical programs featuring international guest artists, pops performances, and education and family concerts. In 1942 the orchestra adopted the name of the former Louisville Philharmonic Society, which it kept until 1977 before reverting to its original name. The orchestra is the resident performing group for the Louisville Ballet and the Kentucky Opera, and presents several concerts across the Kentucky/Indiana area.
Tobias Picker is an American composer, pianist, and conductor, noted for his orchestral works Old and Lost Rivers, Keys To The City, and The Encantadas, as well as his operas Emmeline, Fantastic Mr. Fox, An American Tragedy and Lili Elbe, among many other works.
Le Cid is an opera in four acts and ten tableaux by Jules Massenet to a French libretto by Adolphe d'Ennery, Louis Gallet and Édouard Blau. It is based on the play of the same name by Pierre Corneille.
Meriwether Lewis Spratlan Jr. was an American music academic and composer of contemporary classical music.
The Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) is a professional orchestra founded in 1996 by artistic director Gil Rose in Boston, Massachusetts, United States.
Kenneth A. Radnofsky is an American classical saxophonist. He specializes in the alto saxophone, but plays the soprano and other sizes as well. He currently teaches at the New England Conservatory of Music, and Boston University.
Alexander Frey, KM, KStJ, is an American symphony orchestra conductor, virtuoso organist, pianist, harpsichordist and composer. Frey is in great demand as one of the world's most versatile conductors, and enjoys success in the concert hall and opera house, and in the music of Broadway and Hollywood. Leonard Bernstein referred to him as "a wonderful spirit".
Donald Nally is an American conductor, chorus master, and professor of conducting, specializing in chamber choirs, opera, and new music. He is conductor of the professional new-music choir, The Crossing, based in Philadelphia. He teaches graduate students at Northwestern University's Bienen School of Music.
Dalit Hadass Warshaw is a New York-based composer, pianist, and thereminist. Previously on the composition and music theory faculty of Boston Conservatory, she currently serves on the composition faculty at Juilliard and CUNY-Brooklyn College. Her works have been performed by dozens of orchestral ensembles, including the New York Philharmonic and Israel Philharmonic Orchestras, the Boston Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Houston Symphony, the Y Chamber Orchestra, the Colorado Symphony and the Albany Symphony Orchestra. In April 2006, her piece After the Victory for orchestra and chorus, was premiered by the Grand Rapids Symphony and the North American Choral Company. Her first recording, entitled "Invocations" was released by Albany Records in 2011. Her first piano concerto, Conjuring Tristan, was commissioned by the Grand Rapids Symphony in 2014. The work was inspired by Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, as well as by Thomas Mann's novella Tristan. The piece received its world premiere in January 2015, with Warshaw as the soloist.
Russell Keable is a British educator, composer and conductor. Keable studied conducting at the Royal College of Music with Norman Del Mar and later with George Hurst. Since 1983, he has been the principal conductor of London's Kensington Symphony Orchestra, and since 2006, the principal conductor of the University of Surrey's University Symphony Orchestra and Choir. Since 2006, Keable has taught conducting at the University of Surrey.
Kate Lindsey is a mezzo-soprano opera singer from the United States. She is married to the documentary filmmaker Olly Lambert.
Kati Ilona Agócs is a Canadian-American composer and a member of the composition faculty at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Massachusetts.
Lisa Carol Bielawa is a composer and vocalist. She is a 2009 Rome Prize winner in Musical Composition and spent a year composing as a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.
Fantastic Mr. Fox is an opera in three acts composed by Tobias Picker to a libretto by Donald Sturrock based on Roald Dahl's children's novel of the same name. It was premiered by Los Angeles Opera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on December 9, 1998.
The Missouri Chamber Music Festival and Adult Chamber Music Intensive (ACMI) was founded in 2010. The goal of the MOCM Festival concerts is to present the fine art of small ensemble music to a wide audience through an accessible, community-based festival. The ACMI workshop is the educational portion of the festival, placing adult instrumentalists in chamber ensembles with Festival artists for coaching and performance.
Odyssey Opera is an opera company based in Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 2013 by Gil Rose, it typically begins its season with a concert performance of a large, rarely heard opera in the fall, continuing the season with fully staged renditions of early, classical, and contemporary opera. The company is known for performing "offbeat, neglected repertoire, with a special nod to those never, or rarely, performed in Boston" and New England.
Janna Baty is an American mezzo-soprano opera singer. She is best known for her singing in contemporary music and operas. Baty is also a professor at the Yale School of Music where she directs the student opera.
Karol Bennett is an American soprano known for her performances of lieder, chanson, and oratorio and her championing of music by living composers.
Gil Rose and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project once again prove why they are one of the country's leading contemporary music ensembles.
The Boston Modern Orchestra Project...is extremely able and musical...Mr. Rose and his team filled the music with rich, decisive ensemble colors and magnificent solos. In scores whose dominant expressive position is one of rapture, these musicians were rapturous.
'The reason I called it Odyssey Opera was because I wanted to project that we were going to go on a journey, and I wanted to take the audience on a journey, maybe to ports of call they haven't been to before,' (Gil Rose said)
From the ashes of the sadly departed Opera Boston has arisen an exciting new company that has been winning an increasingly enthusiastic following. Odyssey Opera completes its unconventional second season, which began last September with a sold-out and widely admired concert version of Korngold's lush romantic masterpiece "Die Tote Stadt" ("The Dead City"), with what it's calling "British Invasion."
Ideally, every September I'd like to do something like Rienzi: a large concert opera that nobody in Boston could stage. Then we'd turn to staged operas but on a more intimate scale and in a festival format: three or four titles presented over the course of several weeks in May or June, representing a cross-section of styles, from early music to contemporary.
Just over a year later, the upstart organization has notched further triumphs: an ambitious, satisfying trifecta of underexposed Italian operas by Verdi, Mascagni, and Wolf-Ferrari, fully staged in June, and a triumphal concert rendition of Korngold's grandly gorgeous, melancholy masterpiece, "Die Tote Stadt", presented to rapturous response at a sold-out Jordan Hall earlier this month.
Two years ago, Rose inaugurated Odyssey Opera with Wagner's early epic "Rienzi." Last year it was Korngold's gorgeous romance "Die tote Stadt" ("The Dead City"). That performance justifiably sold out. And this year's rarity is a major work by the French composer Jules Massenet, "Le Cid."
Those who packed Jordan Hall enthusiastically cheered this welcome encounter with a production of such skill and energy.
Conductor Gil Rose was something of a Cid himself on the podium Friday, marshaling his large forces in the seemingly-endless series of crashing climaxes typical of this genre.
Massenet's opera, introduced in 1885, enjoyed decades of success but seems to have summarily disappeared after 1919. It has been heard in just a small handful of modern performances in this country. Friday was its Boston premiere.
OPERA BOSTON: Christine Goerke sings Leonore and Michael Hendrick is Florestan in Thaddeus Strassberger's new production of Beethoven's Fidelio. Gil Rose conducts.
Gil Rose conducted with admirable command.
The band of only 15, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, conducted by Gil Rose (September 25), could fill the theatre with rich 'grand-opera' sound when appropriate.