Parting shotsLloyd Shwartz, The Boston Phoenix, May 6, 2005Posted: 2005-05-09 14:18:54 IT WAS A RELIEF next night to hear music of real substance and feeling at the Boston Philharmonic's last concert of the season — a program dealing with the aftermath of war. Benjamin Zander introduced Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima by explaining that each of the 52 string players has a separate part, some of the music is in quarter tones, and some of the timing depends not on individual notes but on the duration of a bar. Much of this sounded muffled from my seat in the last row of Jordan Hall. (Acoustic problems evidently remain after the expensive renovation.) I moved up a few rows for the rest of the concert to hear unfussy, focused performances of Frank Bridge's dour, brooding, eloquent World War I memorial, Oration, Concerto Elegiaco (1930), with one of the BPO's most welcome guests, British cellist Alexander Baillie, for whom unforced virtuosity is merely a means for the most natural and expressive playing, and Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony, with yet another grim march but an exhilarating finale triggered by Thomas Hill's jaunty clarinet.
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