NYT ArtsBeat on Foss: Complete Symphonies

Perhaps this should have been a job for the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, in tribute to Lukas Foss, its music director from 1981 to 1986. But it is no less welcome in these fine performances by Gil Rose and his Boston Modern Orchestra Project. Foss fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1933 and arrived in America in 1937. Through studies at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, Tanglewood in Massachusetts and Yale University, he became thoroughly conversant in lightly modernist American idioms, à la Copland, Bernstein and others, which pervade these more or less traditionally structured works: two early (No. 1, 1944; No. 2, “Symphony of Chorales,” 1955-58) and two late (No. 3, “Symphony of Sorrows,” 1991; No. 4, “Window to the Past,” 1995). All are substantive, richly textured and pleasingly astringent, and any would enliven an otherwise staid orchestral program.