The Boston Modern Orchestra Project, founded by its Artistic Director Gil Rose in 1996, is dedicated to commissioning new works as well as performing and recording music composed during the last 100 years. Having recorded for other labels – including Naxos, Chandos and Albany – Gil Rose set up the orchestra’s own record label in 2008, at a time of upheaval and uncertainty in the industry. The result, BMOP/sound, enabled the orchestra to create an evolving archive of 20th- and 21st-century, mostly American, orchestral music.

BMOP/sound draws heavily on the musical taste and ambition of Gil Rose, who focuses on music he sees as part of a continuous tradition, where craft is more important than concept; it’s a personal vision that requires a personal drive and commitment. The first release on the new label was a recording of John Harbison’s complete ballet Ulysses (1984, revised 2003), which remains one of BMOP/sound’s best-selling albums. In 2024 the label released its 100th album, the first recording of the complete ballet scores by John Alden Carpenter (12/24), which epitomises Rose’s commitment to rediscovering forgotten repertoire from the early 20th century. Another example, and one of Rose’s proudest achievements, is the 2015 recording of the complete symphonies by Lukas Foss (10/15), four works that range stylistically from neoclassicism to serialism, none of which had been recorded commercially before.

Other successes include recordings of iconoclastic works – George Antheil’s 1924 Ballet mécanique (11/16), Virgil Thomson’s 1934 opera Four Saints in Three Acts (2/17) – as well as works by some of the most familiar names of 20th‑century American music, including Samuel Barber, Elliott Carter and John Adams. But BMOP/sound’s catalogue also celebrates the work of a generation of living composers born in the 1950s – including Peter Child, Anthony Davis, David Felder, Nancy Galbraith, Tod Machover, Steven Mackey and Tobias Picker – and promotes the work of younger composers still establishing their reputations, from Keeril Makan and Jeremy Gill to Andrew Norman and Eric Nathan.

The recording of Andrew Norman’s three-movement Play, which the orchestra commissioned and premiered in 2013, illustrates the importance of such advocacy for a young composer. As Norman himself said in a Gramophone interview (11/16): ‘I don’t think I can overestimate the value of that recording and what it has done for me, and what being on the BMOP label has done.’ He went on to compose Sustain in 2018 for the centenary of the LA Philharmonic, which was later issued on DG (2/20). Whether for young composers on an upward trajectory, or older composers who may have lost hope of hearing their music on record, or indeed for all intrepid music lovers, such gratitude is widely shared and richly deserved.

BMOP/sound’s recording of Tobias Picker’s Fantastic Mr Fox (11/19) won a Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording in 2020, while the following year the label received Gramophone’s Special Achievement Award.