Paul Moravec’s music, for me, is consistently bracing, exhilarating and entertaining. His music is written in a style and language that speaks to the logical continuation of some of the great American masters; such as Copland, Schuman and Thomson. He has written in every genre including some recent outstanding contributions to opera. Moravec won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for the Tempest Fantasy, a chamber quartet I personally love!
Boston Modern Orchestra Project's composer-centric independent label BMOP/sound gives access to Pulitzer Prize-winning Moravec's work through this marriage of four highly personal, classical pieces. The graceful title track transforms the mystique of the aurora borealis from natural phenomenon to orchestral arrangement, and "Sempre Diritto!" is an evolving, revolving musical experience written by Moravec after getting lost in Venice, Italy.
With these two recent releases from BMOP/sound we get an attractive bouquet of concertos from a couple of America's most highly regarded contemporary composers, Thomas Oboe Lee (b. 1945) and Paul Moravec (b. 1957, see below). Lee was born in China but left there with his family in 1949, spending ten years in Hong Kong and another six in Brazil. He then emigrated to the United States in 1966, where he pursued extensive musical studies, graduating from Harvard in 1981. He's received a number of outstanding awards, and now teaches at Boston College.
"Location, location, location" is the mantra of real estate, but for centuries geographical locales have also been a boon to the imagination of many a composer. Think of Tchaikovsky, who mimicked the bugle calls he heard each morning while visiting Rome in the opening brass fanfare of his Capriccio Italien. Or Mendelssohn's undulating waves of sound swelling in the Hebrides Overture, his ode to a craggy seaside cave in Scotland.
The ever-intrepid Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) continues to enlighten listeners with more composer-centric album releases by its label BMOP/sound.
Known as the nation’s foremost label launched by an orchestra and devoted exclusively to new music recordings, BMOP/sound today announced the release of two new albums scheduled to drop January 8, 2013 – Paul Moravec: Northern Lights Electric featuring performances by David Krakauer and cellist Matt Haimovitz and Thomas Oboe Lee: Six Concertos featuring jazz-inflected collaborations with a plethora of today’s top soloists.
Northern Lights Electric, the title track on the Boston Modern Orchestra Project's 24th(!) self-released recording in five years, demonstrates just how finely matched the Project is to the album's star composer, Paul Moravec. The polished sort of pleaser that could effortlessly raise the curtain on a subscription concert, this is a symphonic poem for people who love symphonic poems.
An album of orchestral works by Pulitzer-winning composer Paul Moravec, "Northen Lights Electric" was recently released on Boston Modern Orchestra’s house label, BMOP Sound. From the sparkling energy of the title track to the luscious cello concerto Montserrat, performed by Matt Haimovitz, Moravec’s music is full of cinematic sweep without predictability or sentimentality.
