The Boston Modern Orchestra Project was established to commission, perform, and record new and 20th-century works, and it has succeeded admirably in all of those endeavors. Founded by Artistic Director and Conductor Gil Rose in 1996, the orchestra has performed neglected works by 20th-century American composers, championed 21st-century composers, and commissioned around 50 new works, while the orchestra’s label, BMOP/sound, has issued more than 100 CDs.
Shuying Li: The Last Hive Mind is among BMOP/sound’s recent releases. Li, born in China, teaches music at Sacramento State University. In her notes for the CD, Li says that its five works, which were composed between 2012 and 2023, trace her growth as a composer during that period and that The Last Hive Mind was the first composition in which she “allowed [herself] to create something unapologetically fun, adventurous, and emotionally direct.”
Li’s compositional voice — lively, vivid, and remarkably theatrical — remains consistent across these pieces. Crackling rhythms and sharp phrasing are hallmarks, as is imaginative orchestration: the prominent double reeds and ominous piano at the opening of the overture to Li’s opera The Siege, for example, and the thrumming, thumping, anxiety-producing opening of The Last Hive Mind. But the title piece, which was inspired by an episode of the television show Black Mirror, closes with piano riffs that put you right into a darkened bar.
Then there’s Miss Ying-Ning, based on a Chinese folktale about a mortal man who falls in love with a fox-woman. Li creates a remarkable diversity of textures from her heavily divided string orchestra. Its optional narration — written by Joshua Anderson and here charmingly performed by Li herself — was evidently written after the music had been composed. The musical narrative would be quite clear without the spoken text: for example, as Wang Tzu-fu searches for Miss Ying-Ning, you can hear his footsteps fading, either from increasing distance or discouragement.
Out Came the Sun reflects Li’s inner world following the birth of her son, an emotional journey that started with joy but also included “melancholy and confusion,” as the composer writes in her notes. Out Came the Sun includes passages of childlike directness alongside unsettled, uneasy strains. The sun does indeed come out by the end, with a turn toward optimism and light.
The CD closes with Purple Mountains, which uses musical materials from When the Purple Mountains Burn, an opera about the late author Iris Chang and the brutal Nanking Massacre, which Chang chronicled. Purple Mountains is militaristic and anxiety-producing in a completely different way from The Last Hive Mind
