Richard Danielpour’s “Celestial Circus”

An engaging album cover for The Celestial Circus

According to my archives, I have not written about the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) since July of 2024, when I wrote about the album of John Alden Carpenter’s three ballet scores. The latest album in this series was released at the end of this past September under the title The Celestial Circus. The composer for this album is Richard Danielpour; and the title of the album is also the title of the first work on the program, a five-movement suite whose soloist is percussionist Lisa Pegher. In fact, Pegher performs on all three of Danielpour’s compositions on the album. The opening suite is followed by the single-movement “Lacrimae Angeli” (tears of an angle); and the final selection is a concerto for percussion and orchestra entitled “The Wounded Healer.” BMOP is conducted by Richard Danielpour, who founded the ensemble.

It would not surprise me to learn that those of my generation listening to this album will be reminded of Béla Bartók’s Sz. 106, one of his best-known compositions given the title “Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.” (Back in the Fifties, there was a television program about archaeology entitled What in the World that had a field day with that Bartók composition!) That said, all three of Danielpour’s works were composed during the present century, the most recent being “Lacrimae Angeli” (2021) and the earliest being The Celestial Circus (2013). Whether or not he was inspired by Bartók is left as an exercise for the listener, but there is no mention of Bartók on Danielpour’s Wikipedia page! (For that matter, none of the works on The Celestial Circus can be found in the list of orchestral works on that Web page.)

I have been aware of Danielpour since 2017, when his Songs of Solitude & War Songs was a GRAMMY nominee. That said, there always seem to be long intervals between my encounters. Where his impact on San Francisco is concerned, it appears that the last time his music was performed was in February of 2023, when the San Francisco Girls Chorus performed one of the movements from his Three Parables. I suppose I should just get used to long intervals between opportunities to listen to his music!