Search - Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Lee Hyla, Gil Rose :: Trans

"The Boston composer Lee Hyla writes works that deftly blend expressionistic, complex contemporary atonal idioms with elements of avant-garde jazz, rock and even punk... While American orchestras keep commissioning the same handful of tame Neo-Romantics, here is a truly original composer who has yet to gain the attention he deserves." ?Anthony Tommassini, The New York Times In the music of Lee Hyla (b. 1952), without exception, I have always felt that the jagged, honking, barking, raucous, strongly articulated rhythmic layer patrols and protects an inner layer of timeless, crystalline beauty, almost too fragile to survive on its own. His obsessive recycling of material, subtly transformed over the course of the piece, rude interruptions, and unexpected glimpses of an internal radiance all add to a sense of uneasy striving towards a kind of transcendent experience. The three works on this disc?Concerto for Bass Clarinet and Orchestra (1988), Trans (1996), and the Violin Concerto (2001)?are intelligent, but not intellectual. Lee has chosen, in all of these works, to tell a tale, to work within a musical space whose boundaries consist of wildly contrasting elements. The performances on this disc are breathtaking in their perfection. Conductor Gil Rose leads his Boston Modern Orchestra Project into and out of this challenging terrain with panache, convincingly transplanting rock-and-roll riffs into the orchestral environment ?a truly impressive accomplishment. ?Ted Mook, from the liner notes Of related interest: 80491 We Speak Etruscan