World Premieres By Boston Modern Orchestra Project to be Presented In Free Concert

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project will conclude its 28th season with a free concert at New England Conservatory's Jordan Hall, Saturday, May 4, 2025, at 3:00 p.m. Celebrating the versatility of the orchestra, BMOP and its GRAMMY Award-Winning Conductor and Artistic Director Gil Rose, present three virtuosic works by composers Chris Theofanidis, Han Lash, and Jeremy Gill-each concerned with evoking images, memories, feelings, moods.

The program opens with the world premiere of Jeremy Gill's Four Legends from the Silmarillion, a set of four tone poems that musically depicts the most famous characters from J.R.R. Tolkienʼs posthumously published The Silmarillion. Gill takes listeners into the pre-Hobbitt world of middle earth, where there lies a mythological labyrinth of history, society, and power. According to Gill, Four Legends from the Silmarillion sojourns, in the vehicle of the symphonic tone poem, through a sprawling epic that spans from the unseen deeps of the ocean to "the uttermost rim of the world," from the ultimate future to the "place among the stars... before the Earth was created."

Another BMOP-commissioned premiere is Zero Turning Radius by composer Han Lashwhose music has been hailed by The New York Times as "striking and resourceful . . . handsomely brooding." Corroborating the orchestra's relevance, Lash describes Zero Turning Radius as "a prayer sent out to the future that the orchestra - such a beautiful, multi-limbed, amphibious creature - can be a playground in contexts and for kinds of music that remain yet unimagined and can be created in any number of different ways."

Exemplifying his complete mastery of orchestration is Chris Theofanidis's This Dream, strange and moving (1995). According to Theofanidis, "writing a piece of music is like creating a dream that you want to have. The feeling that pervades the work is one of a sense of mystery, and this sentiment is primarily conveyed through the harmonies and orchestration." Theofanidis is currently a professor and chair of composition at Yale University, and composer-in-residence and co-director of the composition program at the Aspen Music Festival.