Boston Modern Orchestra Project

WELLESLEY — A chamber-size contingent of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and director Gil Rose visited Wellesley College on Saturday (part of a weekend tour that also stopped at Bowdoin College and Tufts University) with an all-female-composer program called “Luminous Noise.’’ Such a deliberate spotlight is, hopefully, not quite the necessary corrective to a predominantly male compositional culture that it would have been all too recently, but it still invited consideration of what it does — and does not — mean to be a female composer in the world of...

"It's a half-hour to curtain," said Lisa Bielawa on the phone from backstage at London's Barbican hall. Bielawa, an adventurous and increasingly well-known composer, has been a singer with the Philip Glass Ensemble for more than 20 years. The group was about to embark on the last of eight London performances of Glass's epochal 1976 opera, "Einstein on the Beach. " When Bielawa first began performing in "Einstein," she sang in the chorus; for these performances, she was singing the soprano solos and directing the chorus.

"It's a half-hour to curtain," said Lisa Bielawa on the phone from backstage at London's Barbican hall. Bielawa, an adventurous and increasingly well-known composer, has been a singer with the Philip Glass Ensemble for more than 20 years. The group was about to embark on the last of eight London performances of Glass's epochal 1976 opera, "Einstein on the Beach. " When Bielawa first began performing in "Einstein," she sang in the chorus; for these performances, she was singing the soprano solos and directing the chorus.

It didn't take Gil Rose long to fill his schedule. Just before Christmas, Rose's position as artistic director of Opera Boston disappeared when the company closed. Today, Monadnock Music, based in Peterborough, N.H., and known for its annual summer music festival, appointed Rose as its new artistic director. Rose, who also leads the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, replaces Jonathan Bagg and Laura Gilbert, the former co-artistic directors who last year were told that they would not be invited back as part of changes being made at Monadnock Music.

It didn't take Gil Rose long to fill his schedule. Just before Christmas, Rose's position as artistic director of Opera Boston disappeared when the company closed. Today, Monadnock Music, based in Peterborough, N.H., and known for its annual summer music festival, appointed Rose as its new artistic director. Rose, who also leads the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, replaces Jonathan Bagg and Laura Gilbert, the former co-artistic directors who last year were told that they would not be invited back as part of changes being made at Monadnock Music.

BOSTON MODERN ORCHESTRA PROJECT “Sangita: The Spirit of India’’ At: Jordan Hall, tonight at 8. Tickets: $10-$52. 781-324-0396, www.bmop.org Tonight’s concert “Sangita: The Spirit of India’’ marks the end of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project’s season, and it’s been a busier one than usual. Until fairly recently, BMOP’s season consisted of a sequence of Jordan Hall concerts. Now that series is merely one part of a flood of activity that includes a series of chamber concerts at clubs, opera productions, and, this season, concerts at...

It seems odd to call a program with five brand new orchestral pieces commonplace. But somehow it seems apt when talking about the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, a group for whom the unexpected has become almost predictable. The five premieres on Friday's concert spoke in vastly disparate languages, each of which BMOP's fine orchestra and music director Gil Rose brought off as though it was a well-honed specialty. Leading off the lengthy program was Geoffrey Gordon's "Shock Diamonds," an exercise in rapidly shifting textures and vivid orchestral effects.

Gil Rose and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project present, more often than not, anthologized programming: one-night overviews of a single tradition, composer, or genre. Such concerts can veer toward stylistic diffusion, but Friday's collection of string-instrument concertos presented the opposite danger - a surfeit of similarity. Elliott Schwartz's "Chamber Concerto VI: Mr. Jefferson," Robert Erickson's "Fantasy" for cello and orchestra, and Martin Boykan's Violin Concerto all exemplified post-World War II mainstream new music: tempered dissonance, rhapsodic rhetoric,...

A few minutes into the Boston Modern Orchestra Project's performance of Pascal Dusapin 's chamber-ensemble piece "Coda," Gil Rose brought the music to a sudden halt. He calmly explained to the audience that he'd just encountered "every conductor's nightmare": He'd turned three pages in his score at once. And when that happens, he said with a small smile, there's nothing to do but start over. The audience laughed and clapped good-naturedly; after seeing enough performances run with almost mechanical precision, it was refreshing to be reminded that...

Four world premieres in one night is ambitious even by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project's standards, but Saturday's novelty at Jordan Hall was also an old-fashioned Boston tryout for a New York opening: This week, conductor Gil Rose and the group bring the program to Brooklyn's MATA Festival, an annual new-music showcase previously run by BMOP's current composer-in-residence, Lisa Bielawa. The concert began with a flourish: Alejandro Rutty's "The Conscious Sleepwalker Loops," a MATA commission, a riotous collage of Argentine tango, some over-the-top...

BOSTON MODERN ORCHESTRA PROJECT “Sangita: The Spirit of India’’ At: Jordan Hall, tonight at 8. Tickets: $10-$52. 781-324-0396, www.bmop.org Tonight’s concert “Sangita: The Spirit of India’’ marks the end of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project’s season, and it’s been a busier one than usual. Until fairly recently, BMOP’s season consisted of a sequence of Jordan Hall concerts. Now that series is merely one part of a flood of activity that includes a series of chamber concerts at clubs, opera productions, and, this season, concerts at Tufts University and Wellesley and...

WELLESLEY — A chamber-size contingent of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and director Gil Rose visited Wellesley College on Saturday (part of a weekend tour that also stopped at Bowdoin College and Tufts University) with an all-female-composer program called “Luminous Noise.’’ Such a deliberate spotlight is, hopefully, not quite the necessary corrective to a predominantly male compositional culture that it would have been all too recently, but it still invited consideration of what it does — and does not — mean to be a...

After giving each orchestra section a spotlight concert this season, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and artistic director Gil Rose brought a full symphonic complement to Jordan Hall on Friday, with a program to match: five canvases of splashy instrumentation. The complement was in fine form indeed, zealous and bold. New-music advocacy doesn’t get more luxurious. Three shorter works distilled vivid colors. Anthony De Ritis’s “Legerdemain’’ sustained a dramatically dark-hued mood: bursts of action (one featuring cop-show-worthy driving cymbal)

It seems odd to call a program with five brand new orchestral pieces commonplace. But somehow it seems apt when talking about the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, a group for whom the unexpected has become almost predictable. The five premieres on Friday's concert spoke in vastly disparate languages, each of which BMOP's fine orchestra and music director Gil Rose brought off as though it was a well-honed specialty. Leading off the lengthy program was Geoffrey Gordon's "Shock Diamonds," an exercise in rapidly shifting textures and vivid orchestral effects.

John Harbison's music is so ubiquitous here that you might think there was nothing more to discover. Yet until Friday, Boston had never heard "Winter's Tale," the Shakespeare-based opera he composed in the 1970s. The ever-intrepid Boston Modern Orchestra Project's concert performance took place, ironically, on the first day of spring. Harbison created his own libretto from the play, streamlining the action and synthesizing its five acts into two, which divide neatly along emotional lines.

Gil Rose and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project present, more often than not, anthologized programming: one-night overviews of a single tradition, composer, or genre. Such concerts can veer toward stylistic diffusion, but Friday's collection of string-instrument concertos presented the opposite danger - a surfeit of similarity. Elliott Schwartz's "Chamber Concerto VI: Mr. Jefferson," Robert Erickson's "Fantasy" for cello and orchestra, and Martin Boykan's Violin Concerto all exemplified post-World War II mainstream new music: tempered dissonance, rhapsodic rhetoric,...

John Harbison's music is so ubiquitous here that you might think there was nothing more to discover. Yet until Friday, Boston had never heard "Winter's Tale," the Shakespeare-based opera he composed in the 1970s. The ever-intrepid Boston Modern Orchestra Project's concert performance took place, ironically, on the first day of spring. Harbison created his own libretto from the play, streamlining the action and synthesizing its five acts into two, which divide neatly along emotional lines.

To write a concerto for an indigenous instrument may be an obvious way to create a multicultural piece, but it is not the easiest. Most folk instruments don't have the power to compete with an orchestra, although electronics can help; most also involve tunings that can't mesh with the compromises of the well-tempered Western scale. So the practical thing to do is to use the orchestra as a kind of backdrop in front of which the indigenous instrument does its thing, and that is pretty much what Jin Hi Kim, Henry Cowell, and Reza Vali did in the pieces Gil Rose...

Four world premieres in one night is ambitious even by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project's standards, but Saturday's novelty at Jordan Hall was also an old-fashioned Boston tryout for a New York opening: This week, conductor Gil Rose and the group bring the program to Brooklyn's MATA Festival, an annual new-music showcase previously run by BMOP's current composer-in-residence, Lisa Bielawa. The concert began with a flourish: Alejandro Rutty's "The Conscious Sleepwalker Loops," a MATA commission, a riotous collage of Argentine tango, some over-the-top Hollywoodesque flamenco, and various...

Anyone who caught the Ben Folds performance with the Boston Pops last week and was struck by the thinness of the meeting of musical worlds should have been there on Saturday night at Sanders Theatre to hear the Boston Modern Orchestra Project tee off on three bracingly imaginative works infused with rock 'n' roll and other popular styles. The revolution in the idea of what an orchestra can be -- from a collective instrument designed for the traditional symphonic repertoire, into an omnivorous agent of the new -- has been underway for well over a decade...