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MUSIC REVIEW

Boston Philharmonic delivers bold, bracing Brahms

By Jeffrey Gantz

 |  Globe Correspondent  

  November 21, 2011

An “All Brahms’’ concert might sound like comfort-food programming, but “All Brahms’’ can easily turn into “All Bland, All Bombast, and All Boring,’’ with the lush tunes and defiant outbursts obliterating the composer’s precise polyphony, his contrapuntal designs, his displaced rhythms and phrases, and, most of all, his sly humor. The two big Brahms works that conductor Benjamin Zander and the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra offered Saturday evening at Jordan Hall - Piano Concerto No. 1, with Croatian soloist Martina Filjak, and Symphony No. 4 - didn’t entirely avoid bombast, but they weren’t bland, and they weren’t boring.

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