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[0:14] Robert Bannon: Hi, everybody. Welcome to the round table. My name is Robert Bannon. You're listening to us on the Broadway Podcast Network, watching us on Broadway World or over on social media. I'm excited. You know, we've been talking a lot about tours. We've been talking a lot about theater and art and life that is not in New York City. And one of my favorite cities in the entire world is Boston. And there's no city in the entire world that's more in tune with some of the political songs and this political satire and things that are going on in this crazy world than Boston. So you need everybody, you need, need, need to come check it out. Our next guest has Grammy Awards galore, started this organization, and he's way too smart and musical and educated to be on this trashy messy show based in New Jersey. So I'm just gonna pretend that I know what I'm talking about, and we're gonna talk about the Gershwins and classical music with Gil Rose. Gil Rose, welcome to the round table.

[1:07] Gil Rose: It's great to be here. Thanks.

[1:09] Robert Bannon: Thank you so much for being here. This is a great intro. That was a great intro. Thank you.

[1:14] Robert Bannon: Well, I'm excited to have you here because Odyssey Opera and Boston Modern Orchestra Project. Do you call it BMOP?

[1:22] Gil Rose: Yeah, we do.

[1:25] Robert Bannon: You have to be a certain kind of crazy yourself to come up with or starting an organization like this in a city as prolific in history and art and culture as Boston. So how did it all start?

[1:36] Gil Rose: Oh wow, it's been a while. The orchestra, Boston Modern Orchestra Project started in 1996. So that's getting close to 30 years. Odyssey Opera about 15 years ago, and we do some projects together, and this one we have coming up is a wild evening of George and Ira Gershwin on steroids, I think.

[2:02] Robert Bannon: Which George and Ira Gershwin on steroids sounds like an event that you need to buy a ticket to, and you can get your ticket at BMOP.org, and the tickets are less than a hundred dollars. A ticket for the best seats. You could get a ticket for like 35 bucks. So it's a good evening and a good night out and supports art and culture. They have a Pulitzer Prize-winning Of Thee I Sing. It's from 1931. And then there was a sequel in 1933 called Let 'Em Eat Cake, which I did some research, it had a much less of a run.

[2:34] Gil Rose: Yes. It was not their biggest hit. It may have been their biggest flop, actually.

[2:40] Robert Bannon: So are there music that we know? Are these songs that we have?

[2:44] Gil Rose: There's tunes, yeah. I think the most famous tunes are probably the title tune of Of Thee I Sing and Love is Sweeping the Country is one that outlived the musicals. But they have a bunch of music that people won't know but will love. I mean, the evening is full of toe-tappers, and the tunes actually from the first musical reappear in the sequel. It's very much a unified story between the two musicals.

[3:16] Gil Rose: So it was a continuation from one story, and then they took a couple years. I think they wanted to have the financial success that they had with the first one, with the second one, and they wanted to keep it going because the first one had just sort of run down, and I think the touring companies were closing up, and they thought, well, let's prime this pump one more time. And they did it, and boy, did they. The second one is wild. Basically, it starts out as a Gershwins Brothers musical and sort of ends up as a Marx Brothers movie. So it's pretty crazy.

[3:49] Robert Bannon: Well, come on, you gotta we everybody if we that means you gotta get a ticket and see it. You have an incredible cast. Can you tell us a little? You have soloists, you have this orchestra, you have the opera chorus. Who what are how many people are involved in this?

[4:01] Gil Rose: Oh wow, I yeah, I didn't uh it's probably about in any one moment at the maximum, I think it's probably 85 people on stage, something like that.

[4:10] Robert Bannon: Wow.

[4:11] Gil Rose: So it's gonna be raucous.

[4:13] Robert Bannon: Yeah, it's gonna be raucous. What is rehearsal like?

[4:16] Gil Rose: Um raucous. Well, all these classical players and some of them opera singers, you know, they're like kids in a candy shop with all these tunes, so they're cutting loose. It's fun.

[4:30] Robert Bannon: Well, in your press release, you talk about it being almost a hundred years old, but as relevant as now. Why, what about it strikes? I mean, we're in a political climate.

[4:42] Gil Rose: Right. Well, the first musical was a political satire of Of Thee I Sing, but not really incendiary. There was a lot of commentary about the politics of the day and, you know, corruption and the contradictions that politicians carry with them all the time. But then in the sequel, Let 'Em Eat Cake, they went full bore. The story in the second, well, the story in the first one is about a presidential election, and then in the second one, the guy who was elected in the first musical, President Wintergreen, he um he's unelected, he loses an election and he refuses to accept the results of the election. And he starts a clothing merchandise company to galvanize his followers and raise money, and then they decide they're gonna overthrow the government, and then they storm the Capitol, and then they try to execute the vice president. Now, I don't it sounds kind of familiar to me, but um, yeah, this stuff was you can't make it up. When I tell people that, they have the same reaction you're having right now.

[5:50] Gil Rose: Seriously. It sounds like somebody saw this and used that as well.

[5:56] Robert Bannon: Yeah, yeah.

[5:57] Gil Rose: Well, yeah, it's a little more entertaining in this format than it was in the other one. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff. Left and right, there's references to things, social politics, equity politics, economic politics. It's all there, you know, 85 years in advance. It's crazy, really.

[6:21] Robert Bannon: So we can see this all take place right on stage. But tell us about the venue. I mean, you guys have been in a place. Why is this venue good for this kind of?

[6:28] Gil Rose: Yeah, we do this format fairly annually where we do what we call a semi-staged opera. So the orchestra's on stage, the chorus is on stage, singers come in and out in costumes, but there's no scenic. So what I've done with the shows to make them, you know, be able to do them in one night. They were both originally three-hour musicals with lots of text, and the books were endless. They just went on and on and on. And we boiled it all down to two and a half hours. So we cut almost all the dialogue, and a fair amount of the music too. So it goes from like number to number to number. Everybody's gonna be especially me, probably exhausted at the end of it.

[7:13] Robert Bannon: I'm sure because you are conducting this monster. BMOP.org. Everyone get your tickets while we're talking, BMOP.org. What makes a person? This is totally on topic but off topic. What makes a person, in your opinion, say, I don't want to be a musician, I want to be the boss of the musician? What is the moment? Does someone ask you, do you have that desire? Like I haven't even I'm not even sure I've decided yet. The verdict's still out.

[7:43] Gil Rose: Yeah, people ask me when did you decide to be a conductor? And I always answer by saying, I haven't quite decided yet. But I've been doing it for a long time, so I guess I'm stuck with it.

[7:54] Robert Bannon: What makes a good conductor? Is it about timing? Is it about motivation? Is it about the knowledge of the music? What is it that makes a conductor?

[8:03] Gil Rose: Yes, all those things. And also knowledge of people and like how to motivate people, coordinate people. You know, being a conductor is often very much like being a shrink for about a hundred people at the same time. You know, it's just about getting from here to there and having a vision of what you want to bring to the public.

[8:28] Gil Rose: I have a lot of friends who are professional musicians that play in pits on Broadway or play in orchestras, and they say, and I want to get Gil Rose in trouble, but they say that the instruments that people play sometimes tend to their personality.

[8:42] Robert Bannon: Yeah, do you feel that?

[8:44] Gil Rose: I've yeah, I've heard that. Yeah. And sometimes I can pick out what instrument people play before they divulge what they play.

[8:55] Robert Bannon: So fascinating to me. So in your orchestra, do people audition or do you sit in on the auditions? How do you pick the people who get the chairs?

[9:02] Gil Rose: Yeah, I mean, we have a roster of players we've had for 25 years, and new ones come in and we run auditions every other year and keep it fresh and keep the orchestra playing well. So they're crackerjack, they really they make my job easy.

[9:21] Robert Bannon: If you go to GilroseConductor.com, you can go to Gil's website and uh you're a conductor, so I feel like I should call you like Maestro Rose or Mr. Rose and be very formal. But I don't want to be disrespectful to the conductor. GilroseConductor, I'm a singer and singers are the divas, and I would never want to put a bad name on a singer. Like, you know, we are the difficult ones, Gil.

[9:48] Gil Rose: Yeah, well, I've known it to be true a couple times, yeah.

[9:51] Robert Bannon: See, I told you. So when you go to your website, you could see your discography of recorded music, and you have recorded a lot of albums and music. Why is that? You know, we can't all be in Boston. We can't all get there, but your music can be around the world. What is it like when you hear from people who your music or your renditions are?

[10:10] Gil Rose: I heard from somebody the other day, we had a little small private concert with some chamber music, and one of the players in the orchestra played, and he came up to me. He's been in the orchestra maybe seven, eight years, I think. Um, and he came up to me afterwards and he played on this little concert. And he came up and he said, you know, I just wanted to tell you when I was in school, your recordings made a big difference for me. And I thought, wow, did I feel old immediately? But uh, you know, it's true. We play music and record music that nobody else plays or records, so the fact that we do it commercially and then it's available online or for purchase or in libraries, I mean, that helps what we do outlast the moment of the concert, and it gives it uh gives it more impact, I think.

And we hear from people all over the world who, you know, we see our downloads and we see we had a download in Manchuria, and we're like, no. And yeah, we did. We've had, you know, people all over the world listen to what we do, so it's really gratifying to have that reach.

[11:13] Robert Bannon: What is the tie? I read about you. There's a record label tie-in to this. At what point did you decide like we need to do more than just a live performance? We need to preserve this music and have it accessible and recorded.

[11:24] Gil Rose: Well, I have the great curse of being an audiophile and a record collector. Okay. And I won't even tell you how many uh CDs and albums I have because it yeah, it's not good for my image. But I was always interested in the recorded format, you know. And so when we started uh after a couple years, we started recording and we were releasing things on other labels, and then after a while I thought, well, we're doing all the work. We're you know, we're making the recording, we're raising the money, we're picking the repertoire. We were even picking the cover images, and I thought, you know, we'll just put a UPC code on it ourselves. And now in July, we released our hundredth album on our own label.

[12:05] Robert Bannon: Yeah.

[12:06] Gil Rose: A hundred albums and the Grammy Awards and the nominations and things like that. That must be quite a moment to um when you've started. I mean, this is your baby.

[12:15] Gil Rose: Yeah, it was the first time we got a Grammy nomination, we we almost fell off our chair. So we've had, I think, like 11 now, but um it's always a scene always. I love to go out to the Grammy because first of all, it's usually the first week of February, so you get to go to LA and get the hell out of Boston and leave the snow behind. And uh it's just a circus. It's a fun, fun, fun three days. So I always try to go if I can if we get nominated.

[12:45] Robert Bannon: Well, I'm sure you're gonna get nominated, and we want to listen to the music and we want to make sure we support, and one of the ways you could support is to go to the website and obviously buy tickets if you're in the Boston area, especially for this next performance. And then also you can stream or buy the music, buy the music and listen to the music. Do you feel you travel and you do a lot of guest conducting, you speak to a lot of music students, you go to a lot of different uh symphonies and orchestras and speak around the country. A lot of the times we have this idea that this kind of music is is dying or that it's struggling, or that it's it that the audience is gone. Do you feel that way? Do you do you feel inspired by the next generations of people who preserve classical music?

[13:27] Gil Rose: I think that, you know, classical music is dying. I mean, to get to right to the point, but it's always been dying. It's been dying for a hundred years, and it stays alive because it's got something special about it. It's a fine wine, it's a you know, a great um great caviar. It's the it's the cream of the crop. And people who are searching for really wonderful uh auditory experience find their way to it. So it'll survive. I think the format by which it survived is affected by media and trends, but just it's always paradoxical. Just when you think things are siphoning out of it, there's some new thing that comes along and energizes it. So it's um it'll be all right. It'll be all right.

[14:17] Robert Bannon: How can people support? Do you you guys are an organization? Do you rely on donations?

[14:21] Gil Rose: Yeah, we're a charitable organization. We have a charitable mission to present this music. Uh we we define it as music within the last 100 years, and uh people can support by coming to a concert, they can go online, make a donation, they can buy a record, they can reach out to us and tell us you know what what they heard that moved them, and we'll enter into the conversation. So they should just check us out, I think is the starting point. B bemount.org. Go for go to the website, find out all the information, and you can click on all the links.

[14:56] Robert Bannon: You guys, I'm sure have a litany. How often do you do events? Like w is there certain milestone events that happen every year?

[15:03] Gil Rose: Well, there's you know, we do between five and eight concerts a year, depending on what's going on. We do residencies, we do collaborative events with other organizations, opera companies and ballets, and we make records and uh so it's there's bigger concerts, there's little concerts last year. We played Carnegie Hall for the first time, so that was a big moment. And there's, you know, coming out of the pandemic, we've had a lot of big concerts. We did a big concert at Boston Symphony Hall, which is a 2300 seat venue, and um, you know, there's stuff coming around the bend, and we've got big projects, and we just keep going. You know, the old the old Satchel Paige line don't look behind you, somebody might be gaining on you.

[15:45] Robert Bannon: That you know, and that's I I I love that line, and I love the idea. I personally love Boston because it's a tough city. I'm from New Jersey, I live in Detroit. Uh I love a tough city, and Boston, you know, these tough they're like America. In all sorts of ways.

[15:59] Gil Rose: Yes, America's born literally, right out of the toughness of Boston.

[16:04] Robert Bannon: And um, and you doing this show in this time is as prevalent and as relevant as ever. And also to keep the music of the Gershwins alive, which is you know some of the great American songbook, the greatest songs of all time.

[16:15] Gil Rose: Well, it's also really great to do like the unknown. I just did an interview earlier for the press today, and the interviewer said, you know, I never heard of these musicals. And the Gershwins brothers are known now for their standards, but also American in Paris or Porgy and Bess. But they must have written 12 to 14 Broadway musicals or more, and that's where they really you know made their bones was as Broadway Tin Pan Alley uh guys, and these shows were very important to their development. Um, you know, this uh Of Thee I Sing was the first musical to ever be acknowledged by the Pulitzer Prize. George didn't win it, but Ira won it for the words, and they're as biting and sometimes very politically incorrect by our standards today, but they all have um you know high satire in mind, and uh they're all making comments about who we are uh as Americans and what was true in 1931 seems to be true in 2024.

[17:13] Robert Bannon: Absolutely, history repeats itself, and you can get a taste of that right with this evening. Uh congratulations, what you've done and what you the undertaking and the success that you've had. If I'm ever in Boston, I'm gonna come over and I'm gonna drink a Diet Coke out of one of your Grammy Awards.

[17:27] Gil Rose: Sounds good.

[17:27] Robert Bannon: You yeah, okay.

[17:31] Gil Rose: Yeah, bring something better out of a Grammy or something.

[17:35] Robert Bannon: Okay, that's fine. All right, but I was not trying to be too presumptuous.

[17:38] Gil Rose: Yeah, you know, as very welcome.

[17:40] Robert Bannon: You wouldn't be the first person to drink something out of it.

[17:43] Gil Rose: I'm sure, see, that's it. That's a bucket list item for me right here.

[17:47] Robert Bannon: Um, I'm excited for you, and I'm excited for people to see that out. We got to support, you know, I say on this show all the time because a lot of times we talk to Broadway people, and I say, like, no matter where you live in this country, there's a theater, there's an opera, there's a classical organization, there's a charity organization, a community theater. Somebody's putting on art in their heart and soul, and we gotta support keeping that alive across this country and the world. So thank you for what you do.

[18:06] Gil Rose: Thank you, Robert.

[18:08] Robert Bannon: Thank you for what you do. Everybody get a ticket if you're in Boston or stream. I I was just on the bmop.org website. They have a lot of music, a lot a hundred albums out plus. So make sure you check it out and we look forward to seeing you in the next one.

[18:23] Gil Rose: Sounds good.