The Boston Modern Orchestra Project stands as a leading ensemble focused on presenting and promoting contemporary music. It has earned multiple ASCAP honors for bold orchestral programming, received nominations for prominent awards, and produced dozens of recordings across numerous labels.
Gil Rose established the ensemble in 1996 and remained its artistic director and conductor into the early 2020s. Performances occur primarily at Jordan Hall on the New England Conservatory of Music campus in Boston, with additional appearances in New York City, at Tanglewood, and at other American sites.
Although the group prioritizes new compositions, including many commissions, it also revives overlooked scores from the twentieth century. Listeners encounter neither Mozart nor Beethoven but instead infrequently programmed pieces by Schoenberg or Webern. Typical programs include music by Arthur Berger, Lukas Foss, and John Harbison alongside less familiar figures such as Shih-Hui Chen, Michael Gandolfi, and Lee Hyla, among many others. Rose attracted skilled performers and prominent composers from the outset, resulting in more than thirty commissions and over seventy world premieres during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Beginning in 2000, the ensemble has appointed a composer-in-residence for each season.
Recordings began only after 2000, with Naxos issuing a Rochberg album in 2002 and Chandos following with the Lukas Foss opera Griffelkin the next year. Further releases appeared on Innova, Arsis, Albany, and additional imprints. In 2008 the organization introduced its own BMOP/Sound label with a widely praised recording of John Harbison’s ballet Ulysses. By early 2020 the catalog exceeded fifty titles, among them Charles Fussell’s Symphony for Baritone and Orchestra (“Wilde”) from 2008, which earned a Grammy nomination. The ensemble captured the 2020 Grammy for Best Opera Recording with Tobias Picker: Fantastic Mr. Fox. Activity continued through the COVID-19 pandemic, yielding recordings of Norman Dello Joio’s The Trial at Rouen in 2020 and Samuel Barber’s Medea in 2021. Releases in 2022 included Gail Kubik’s Symphony Concertante, Anthony Davis’s opera X – The Life and Times of Malcolm X, and the John Corigliano orchestral collection To Music.
