Jonathan McPhee and The Longwood Symphony Orchestra

Published May 6, 2010 at 7:58 p.m.
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Jonathan McPhee and The Longwood Symphony Orchestra at Jordan Hall on May 1, 2010

NEVER MIND THE SIBELIUS This was Nielsen that made you sit up and take notice. (Pictured: conductor Jonathan McPhee.)

The last time I reviewed a Longwood Symphony Orchestra concert, we got Silvestre Revueltas’s Sensemayá, the Coronation Scene from Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, and Janácek’s Glagolitic Mass. Before that, it was Samuel Barber’s Night Flight and the Beethoven Ninth. One of the virtues of having so many “second-tier” orchestras in Boston, like the Longwood and the Boston Philharmonic (which just performed the Revueltas a couple of weeks back), is that we get to hear repertoire that doesn’t make it to the BSO. The members of the LSO are mostly area medical professionals, but they play like musical professionals, and they have one of Boston’s best conductors in Jonathan McPhee (who also directs the Lexington Symphony, the Nashua Symphony, and the Boston Ballet Orchestra).

The program last Saturday was Rachmaninov’s ferociously difficult D-minor Piano Concerto (a/k/a “Rach 3”), with British guest soloist Philip Edward Fisher, and Danish composer Carl Nielsen’s World War I–haunted Symphony No. 4, the “Inextinguishable.” The Rachmaninov is one of those “standard” pieces that doesn’t actually get played very often — Gabriela Montero did it with Benjamin Zander and the Boston Philharmonic last year, but BSO maestro James Levine is not known for Rachmaninov, and the last time I remember hearing this piece in Symphony Hall was way back when David Helfgott (the Shine pianist) was in town. As for Nielsen, he hardly turns up at all.

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