Winkler's Weekly Symphony Guide: Modernism Triumphs
By Matthew Winkler | October 12At last week’s Sept. 30 concert, an older woman approached me during intermission and told me how incensed she was by the program. To play not only a contemporary piece but also the modernist Shostakovich was simply too much! Luckily, “her Haydn,” as the woman would call Joseph Hadyn, closed the concert, saving her bourgeois sensibilities. I would have loved to see her reaction to the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s third and most recent Oct. 6–8 set, which flaunted a daring line-up of only 20th and 21st century works. Additionally interesting was that all of the pieces were “program music,” meaning they all tried to represent a non-musical narrative or image.