Friday, March 25, 2016 | 8:00pm
Pre-concert talk one hour prior to concert
David Del Tredici Child Alice (complete)

Gil Rose, conductor

At this time, all of the tickets to Child Alice have been reserved. Thank you for making this a full house! We will be releasing any unclaimed tickets shortly before the concert begins at 8pm. You must be at Jordan Hall to use these tickets.

Due to a grant from the Recording Industry's Music Performance Trust Fund, BMOP is able to present David Del Tredici: Child Alice free of charge in celebration of our 20th season.

BMOP performs David Del Tredici’s landmark orchestral work Child Alice in a rare complete performance of Part I, In Memory of a Summer Day, and Part II, Quaint Evens—Happy Voices—All in a Golden Afternoon. Del Tredici’s ongoing fascination with both Lewis Carroll’s classic tales and the process behind their creation has led to an evolving project of song cycles that stand out for their vivid characterizations and complexity of meanings. Probing the gray areas between innocence and knowledge, imagination and reality, form and chaos, Child Alice sets texts from the preface poems to Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass for amplified soprano, interspersed with orchestral movements that Del Tredici describes as “chapters from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland that got away.” Part I of Child Alice won the Pulitzer Prize in music in 1980.

Metropolitan Opera National Finalist Courtenay Budd is a leading interpreter of Del Tredici’s work and has performed with the composer as accompanist to great acclaim.

Program notes (opens in new window)

News and Press

[Concert Review] Listening to Alice’s Thoughts

David Del Tredici’s ambitious ‘Child Alice’ reveals a complicated vision.

The Wall Street Journal Full review
[Concert Review] Alice Project From Essential Modern Orchestra

The capacity crowd at Jordan Hall Friday night knew they were gathered for an Event. For only the second time, and probably the last time in his lifetime, composer David Del Tredici heard his complete Child Alice, the hugest and most elaborate of his many settings from Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. Thanks to the generosity of the Recording Industry’s Music Performance Trust Fund, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project’s superb show with soprano Courtenay Budd under the direction of Gil Rose was free.

The Boston Musical Intelligencer Full review
[Concert Review] Rose, BMOP wax ecstatic in glorious, unsettling ‘Alice’

Let’s say for the sake of context that I first became aware of the American composer David Del Tredici and his extensive string of extensive works based on Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” fantasies through a 1983 recording of “In Memory of a Summer Day,” the first part of a larger work, “Child Alice” (1977-81). It’s fair to say that I’d been waiting three decades to hear “Child Alice” in full. The opportunity came at last on Friday in a concert presented at Jordan Hall by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project to conclude its 20th-anniversary season.

The Boston Globe Full review