Known as the nation’s foremost label launched by an orchestra and devoted exclusively to new music, Grammy Award-winning BMOP/sound today announced the release of Robert Carl: White Heron, led by conductor Gil Rose and performed by the intrepid Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP). Featuring four of the composer’s orchestral works, this portrait album concerns Carl’s life-long fascination: time and space-concrete, geographical, and metaphorical.

BMOP/sound’s latest release is Tod Machover: Death and the Powers, the MIT composer’s “robot opera.” Featuring baritone James Maddalena as Simon Powers, this opera explores the intersection of humans and technology, corporate superpowers and wealth inequality, and the nature of consciousness itself—what does it mean to be “alive”?

John Corigliano is a difficult composer to pin down stylistically. The generally tonal orientation of his music and the cinematic quality that made his score for The Red Violin such a success have brought him a beloved status rare among contemporary composers. Yet, it would be wrong to call him neo-Romantic; his music has deep rigor and sometimes, as in the Symphony No. 2 on offer here, a quite grim quality. This 2022 release from the Boston Modern Orchestra does not include his most famous works – The Red Violin in either its film score or violin concertos forms, The Ghosts of Versailles, or the Symphony No. 1 – but it offers an excellent window into the richness of Corigliano’s music, in which a great variety of elements collide in unexpected ways. One of those elements is quotation, on display in the opening work, To Music; it is based on Schubert’s song An die Musik, which is assembled with great subtlety over five and a half minutes. Perhaps the high point is Troubadours: Variations for guitar and chamber orchestra, originally written for and recorded by Sharon Isbin; guitarist Eliot Fisk catches the unique lyricism of this lovely work. The Symphony No. 2, adapted from an earlier string quartet, contains a remarkable fugue that exemplifies Corigliano’s way of using classical forms to bring order to distinctly modern impulses. The Boston Modern Orchestra Project approaches the work with real enthusiasm, and for anyone wanting to get beyond the Corigliano “hits,” this makes a fine choice.

Tom [ Scherman, of the Little Orchestra Society ] came to me and said, “Hey Kubik, I’m being pestered all the time by the pianist in my orchestra, Frank Glazer, for a solo appearance, and by Bob Nagel, my trumpet player, and the principal violist [ Theodore Israel ] .” And so Tom, figuring to kill three birds with one stone said, “Can’t you write me a piece for piano, viola, trumpet, and orchestra, and I’ll have my three players do the solo parts and they’ll get off of my back?” I said, “Sure.” And since it came within a month or so after I’d finished recording the score to the film C-Man, which had exactly those three solo instruments, I just re-wrote it as the Symphony Concertante. Don’t do that thinking that you’re going to save time. It’s twice as hard, it’s ten times as hard, than to just write a new piece.

John Corigliano is a difficult composer to pin down stylistically. The generally tonal orientation of his music and the cinematic quality that made his score for The Red Violin such a success have brought him a beloved status rare among contemporary composers. Yet, it would be wrong to call him neo-Romantic; his music has deep rigor and sometimes, as in the Symphony No. 2 on offer here, a quite grim quality. This 2022 release from the Boston Modern Orchestra does not include his most famous works – The Red Violin in either its film score or violin concertos forms, The Ghosts of Versailles, or the Symphony No. 1 – but it offers an excellent window into the richness of Corigliano’s music, in which a great variety of elements collide in unexpected ways. One of those elements is quotation, on display in the opening work, To Music; it is based on Schubert’s song An die Musik, which is assembled with great subtlety over five and a half minutes. Perhaps the high point is Troubadours: Variations for guitar and chamber orchestra, originally written for and recorded by Sharon Isbin; guitarist Eliot Fisk catches the unique lyricism of this lovely work. The Symphony No. 2, adapted from an earlier string quartet, contains a remarkable fugue that exemplifies Corigliano’s way of using classical forms to bring order to distinctly modern impulses. The Boston Modern Orchestra Project approaches the work with real enthusiasm, and for anyone wanting to get beyond the Corigliano “hits,” this makes a fine choice.

Gil Rose has a special knack for finding music that has somehow slipped through the cracks. Here, he gives us three ballet scores composed for Martha Graham and her company by Carlos Surinach (1915 97). Born in Barcelona and trained in Germany (including seminars with Richard Strauss), Surinach settled in 1950 in the United States, where his flamenco-inflected style appealed to leading choreographers.