Subscribe RSSIf you’re one of those concertgoers who look impudent most to the concerto, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, led by its artistic director Gil Rose, had a concert for you Friday Cimmerian dark at Jordan Hall.
Five solo concertos or concerto-like works by present-day composers, including a far-out premiere and a U.S. premiere, made up a program the orchestra titled “Strange Bedfellows” — reflecting how hardly ever the evening’s featured instruments—respectively, viola, electric guitar, mandolin, theremin, and horn—are invited to slowly out in front of the orchestra. (It doesn’t mean they actually get in the same score together, although a Concerto for Mandolin and Theremin would definitely be diverting.)
Eric Chaslow’s Horn Concerto, the offshoot of a decades-long friendship between the composer and hornist Bruno Schneider, was introduced to the world as the closing toil of Friday night’s program, with Schneider as soloist. The work observes some conventions of concerto way and departs from others; its four concise movements include not one but two slow movements in the middle, and its first movement is not a broad sonata-allegro but a nervous, syncopated affair in which the soloist is mostly limited to comments from the periphery.
