Arthur Levering: OceanRiverLake

Arthur Levering

Composer Arthur Levering has received many awards for his work including the Rome Prize, the Heckscher Foundation Composition Prize, the Lee Ettelson Composer’s Award, commissions from the Fromm Foundation and the Barlow Endowment, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. He has been commissioned by various ensembles including the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Boston Musica Viva, the New Juilliard Ensemble, the Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble, Sequitur, Musica d’Oggi (Italy), and the Rascher Saxophone Quartet (Germany). His music has also been performed by such prominent groups as the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the League of Composers/ISCM, Voices of Change, NewEar, and Lontano, among others, and has been featured at concerts and festivals in Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland. Compact discs of his work include School of Velocity, CRI CD 812 (“the best debut album by an American composer I’ve heard this year”—Robert Carl, Fanfare, July/August, 1999), Still Raining, Still Dreaming, New World CD NW 80662, and Parallel Universe, New World CD NW 80750.

Boston Modern Orchestra Project

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project is the premier orchestra in the United States dedicated exclusively to commissioning, performing, and recording music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Described by The New York Times as “one of the most artistically valuable” orchestras in the country, BMOP is a unique institution in today’s musical world, disseminating exceptional orchestral music “new or so woefully neglected that it might as well be” via performances and recordings of the highest caliber.

Founded by Artistic Director Gil Rose in 1996, BMOP has championed composers whose careers span over a century. Each season, Rose brings BMOP’s award-winning orchestra, renowned soloists, and influential composers to the stage of New England Conservatory’s historic Jordan Hall, with programming that is “a safe haven for, and champion of, virtually every ism, and every genre- and era-mixing hybrid that composers’ imaginations have wrought” (Wall Street Journal). The musicians of BMOP are consistently lauded for the energy, imagination, and passion with which they infuse the music of the present era.

BMOP’s distinguished and adventurous track record includes premieres and recordings of monumental and provocative new works such as John Harbison’s ballet Ulysses, Charles Wuorinen’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and Lei Liang’s A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams. The composers performed and commissioned by BMOP contain Pulitzer and Rome Prize winners, Grawemeyer Award recipients, and MacArthur grant fellows.

From 1997 to 2013 the orchestra won thirteen ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming. BMOP has been featured at festivals including Opera Unlimited, the Ditson Festival of Contemporary Music with the ICA/Boston, Tanglewood, the Boston Cyberarts Festival, Concerts at the Library of Congress (Washington, DC), the Festival of New American Music (Sacramento, CA), Music on the Edge (Pittsburgh, PA), and the MATA Festival in New York. During its 20th anniversary season, BMOP was named Musical America’s 2016 Ensemble of the Year, the first symphony orchestra in the organization’s history to receive this distinction.

BMOP has actively pursued a role in music education through composer residencies, collaborations with colleges, and an ongoing relationship with the New England Conserva- tory, where it is Affiliate Orchestra for New Music. The musicians of BMOP are equally at home in Symphony Hall, Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, and in Cambridge’s Club Oberon and Boston’s Club Café, where they pursued a popular, composer-led Club Concert series from 2004 to 2012.

BMOP/sound, BMOP’s independent record label, was created in 2008 to provide a platform for BMOP’s extensive archive of music, as well as to provide widespread, top-quality, permanent access to both classics of the 20th century and the music of today’s most innovative composers. BMOP/sound has released over 90 CDs on the label, bringing BMOP’s discography to over 100 titles. BMOP/sound has garnered praise from the national and international press; it is the recipient of a 2020 GRAMMY® Award for Tobias Picker: Fantastic Mr. Fox, eight GRAMMY® Award nominations, and its releases have appeared on the year-end “Best of” lists of The New York Times, The Boston Globe, National Public Radio, Time Out New York, American Record Guide, Downbeat Magazine, WBUR, NewMusicBox, and others.

BMOP expands the horizon of a typical “night at the symphony.” Admired, praised, and sought after by artists, presenters, critics, and audiophiles, BMOP and BMOP/sound are uniquely positioned to redefine the new music concert and recording experience.

Gil Rose

Gil Rose is a conductor helping to shape the future of classical music. His dynamic performances and many recordings have garnered international critical praise. In 1996, Mr. Rose founded the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), whose unique programming and distinguished performances have earned the orchestra fourteen ASCAP awards for adventurous programming as well as the John S. Edwards Award for Strongest Commitment to New American Music. Also one of the country’s most inventive and versatile opera conductors, Mr. Rose founded Odyssey Opera, a new company dedicated to exploring eclectic and overlooked operatic repertoire, in 2013. He led Opera Boston as its Music Director starting in 2003, and in 2010 was appointed the company's first Artistic Director. Mr. Rose serves as the executive producer of the BMOP/sound label, and has led the longstanding Monadnock Music Festival in historic Peterborough, NH, since 2012.

Sarah Brady

Flutist Sarah Brady, hailed as “intensely expressive” (New Music Box) and “colorfully agile” (The Arts Fuse), is principal flute with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) and frequently performs with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, The Boston Pops, Boston Ballet, Boston Lyric Opera and Odyssey Opera. A core member of the Radius Ensemble and Collage New Music, she has collaborated with the Talea Ensemble, The Cortona Collective, Sound Icon, Boston Musica Viva, the Firebird Ensemble and the Silk Road Ensemble. After earning an undergraduate degree as a full scholarship student at the University of Connecticut, Sarah received her graduate degrees from the Longy School of Music under the tutelage of Robert Willoughby. Prizewinner in the Pappoutsakis Flute Competition and the National Flute Association’s Young Artist Competition, Sarah is currently the Commissions Coordinator for the National Flute Association. Her solo, chamber and over 80 orchestral recordings including a 2019 GRAMMY award winning opera recording, can be heard on BMOP/Sound, Albany, New Focus, Naxos, Oxingale, Cantaloupe and Navona Records labels. Associate Professor of Flute at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee, Sarah also runs the Contemporary Classical Performance Program (CCMP).

Maarten Stragier

Maarten Stragier plays guitar, often in a room in his apartment, and sometimes on stage or in studio. He has played in apartments and on stages in the US and Europe. Some highlights were performances at Bozar and Flagey in Brussels, La Philharmonie in Paris, the Oslo Opera House, the ICA in Boston, and the Kennedy Center in Washington DC; and in festivals such as Lucerne Festival, Tanglewood, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Wien Modern, Composit, and Boston GuitarFest.

Maarten enjoys working with composers: picking their brain and messing with their scores with utter dedication and varying degrees of deference. He has premiered compositions by Olga Neuwirth, Raphaël Cendo, Michelle Lou, Mauricio Pauly, Diana Soh, and Santiago Diez-Fischer, and he has worked with Tristan Murail, Salvatore Sciarrino, Philippe Leroux, Chaya Czernowin, Christian Wolff, and Franck Bedrossian on the interpretation of their music.

Recently, Maarten has gotten into collective creative endeavors that move past the old composer-performer paradigm. His partners in this monkey business have been accordionist Luca Piovesan (with whom he makes up the duo Promenade Sauvage) and composer/performer Mauricio Pauly.

Maarten lives in Brussels with his wife Jenn, his son Owen, and his dog Hildie. He is a researcher and professor at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels and at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and a member of the Young Academy of Belgium (Flanders).

Donald Berman

A multidimensional pianist, pedagogue, and scholar, Donald Berman has won tremendous acclaim for his “stupendous abilities, both athletic and intellectual” (Boston Sunday Globe) and performances hailed as “stunning, adventurous, and substantive” (New York Times).

With an emphasis on presenting American music of the 20th and 21st centuries, Berman’s inventive recital programs have been featured on the U.S.’s biggest stages for contemporary music — from Carnegie’s Weill and Zankel Halls to Nation- al Sawdust and (Le) Poisson Rouge — as well as major venues across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. An enthusiastic commissioner of new music, he has added more than 200 works to the contemporary canon — many of which he performs alongside classical repertoires to provoke new and fascinating revelations and connections across periods and styles.

Berman’s body of work as a recording artist demonstrates the breadth and depth of his engagement with the music of our time. His albums have included numerous world-premiere recordings as well as illuminating performances of previously unknown works of 20th-century American composers, includ- ing Charles Ives (The Unknown Ives, Vols. I & II), Carl Ruggles (The Uncovered Ruggles), and Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions (Americans in Rome). As concerto soloist and chamber musi- cian, Berman’s discography includes collaborations with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (George Perle: Serenades), soprano Susan Narucki (This Island, The Light That Is Felt: Songs of Charles Ives, and the Grammy-nominated The Edge of Silence), and the Borromeo Quartet (The Worlds Revolve). Upcoming albums include a survey of Elena Ruehr songs with baritone Stephen Salters and a new recording of Ives’s Concord Sonata and Impression of the St. Gaudens in Boston Common, to be released on Avie Records during the composer’s sesquicentennial celebrations in 2024.

A former fellow of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Berman currently serves as Chair of Keyboard Studies at Longy School of Music of Bard College and leads Tufts University’s New Music Ensemble. He is also the General Editor of three volumes of Ives’s Shorter Works for Piano — a titanic project representing 30 years of work — and President and Treasurer of the Charles Ives Society, where he is leading an extensive expansion of the Society’s digital archives on charlesives.org.

Berman’s trajectory as a musician and scholar was set in motion by four important teachers: Mildred Victor, George Barth, John Kirkpatrick (who premiered Ives’s Concord Sonata in 1939), and legendary pedagogue Leonard Shure.

Lydian String Quartet

From its beginning in 1980, the Lydian String Quartet (Andrea Segar and Judith Eissenberg, violins; Mark Berger, viola; Joshua Gordon, cello) has been acclaimed by audiences and critics across the USA and abroad for embracing the full range of the string quartet repertory with curiosity, virtuosity, and dedication to the highest artistic ideals of music making. In its formative years, the quartet studied repertoire with Robert Koff, a founding member of the Juilliard String Quartet who had joined the Brandeis University faculty in 1958. Forging a personality of their own, the Lydians were awarded top prizes in international string quartet competitions, including Evian, Portsmouth and Banff, culminating in 1984 with the Naumburg Award for Chamber Music.

In the years to follow, the quartet continued to build a reputation for their depth of interpretation, performing with “a precision and involvement marking them as among the world’s best quartets” (Chicago Sun-Times). Residing at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts since the group’s founding, the Lydians continue to offer compelling, insightful, and dramatic performances of the quartet literature. From the acknowledged masterpieces of the classical, romantic, and modern eras to new remarkable compositions written by today’s cutting-edge composers, the quartet approaches music-making with a sense of exploration and personal expression that is timeless.

The Lydian String Quartet has performed extensively throughout the United States at venues such as Jordan Hall in Boston; the Kennedy Center and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; Lincoln Center, Miller Theater, and Weill Recital Hall in New York City; the Pacific Rim Festival at the University of California at Santa Cruz; and the Slee Beethoven Series at the University at Buffalo. Abroad, the Quartet has made appearances in France, England, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Russia, Armenia, and Taiwan.

The Lydians have long championed the commissioning, performing and recording of new works. They enjoy work- ing with young composers at the quartet’s Brandeis home as well as in mini-residencies at universities across the US. Since 2012, the Lydians have expanded the string quartet repertoire through their biennial commission prize, one of the largest chamber music commissioning prizes in the country, resulting in newly commissioned, large-scale works by Kurt Rohde, Steven Snowden, Saad Haddad, Vijay Iyer, Riccardo Zohn-Muldoon, and Lembit Beecher. In recognition of their work, the quartet has received numerous ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming, commission grants from the Fromm Foundation, Chamber Music America, Meet the Composer/Rockefeller Foundation/AT&T Jazz Program in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Aaron Copland Fund for Music.