Gil Rose, founder and conductor of Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) and Opera Odyssey. Photo by Kevin Condon.
In Opera News (subscription required), Elinor Hitt writes, “Gil Rose, founder and conductor of Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) and Odyssey Opera, strides across the recording studio … Singers warm up as the orchestra tunes. ‘We’re good to go?’ Rose asks as he takes the podium and nods toward the control booth, where composer Tobias Picker sits…. Rose is recording Picker’s ‘Awakenings,’ an opera based on neurologist Oliver Sacks’s tenure at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx. The piece, a collaboration between BMOP and Odyssey, had its Boston premiere the day before at the Huntington Theatre…. His label, BMOP/sound, which launched in 2008 … has ninety-one recordings and has been nominated for eight Grammy awards, winning in 2020 … The 2022–23 season [marked] the Covid-delayed celebration of BMOPs twenty-fifth anniversary and Odyssey Opera’s tenth…. Perhaps the most exciting, largest-scale collaboration between BMOP and Odyssey is ‘As Told By: History, Race, and Justice on the Opera Stage’—a five-year-long series of performances and recordings of old and new operas by Black composers,” among them Anthony Davis, Nkeiru Okoye, William Grant Still, Ulysses Kay, and Jonathan Bailey Holland.
