Presto Music
September 24, 2026
Founded in 1996 by the intrepid Pittsburgh-born conductor Gil Rose, the Boston Modern Opera Project is dedicated to commissioning, performing and recording American music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with recent projects including the world premiere recordings of Mark Adamo’s Lysistrata (in collaboration with Pentatone) and albums devoted to the music of Lukas Foss, John Alden Carpenter, Tobias Picker and Dominick Argento (all on their in-house label BMOP/sound, of which Rose is Executive Producer).
We’re thrilled to announce that Presto Music is now the exclusive European physical distributor for BMOP/sound recordings; to mark the beginning of our new partnership, Maestro Rose sat down with Katherine to discuss the label’s mission and select some personal highlights from their extensive catalogue (which now runs to over a hundred recordings).
What was the impetus for founding BMOP?
Even as a kid I was intrigued by how much American music has fallen by the wayside because it passed through the system very quickly. In America we’re fascinated with things of the distant past and things of the here-and-now, but the recent past gets far less attention. In the UK there seems to be a collective dedication to filling in the missing parts, whereas over here we’re very quick to move onto the next thing – we often chase shiny objects, and a lot of compelling music has been discarded as a result.
Many of the composers who attracted me seem to have been cast aside because they didn’t follow whatever style was in vogue at the time – people who didn’t embrace Avant-Gardism or Serialism or Neo-Romanticism when that was flavour of the month. If you look at the Pulitzer Prize winners, a lot of those works still don’t exist on record, or have only been recorded very recently – Douglas Moore’s Giants in the Earth is a real good example – and if we learn more about these pieces we might start to get more of a sense of continuity in American music. We don’t have an equivalent to Verdi or Wagner in our canon: we start with people like Edward MacDowell and John Knowles Paine (or Stephen Foster, if we go back a bit further), then we skip on through to Charles Ives and miss a lot of stops along the way. That’s why this labour of love has been going on for thirty years!
