Music review

BOSTON MODERN

ORCHESTRA PROJECT

“Boston Accents,’’ music of Sanford, Harbison, Sawyer, and Perera; Gil Rose, artistic director

At: Jordan Hall, Friday (repeats April 2 at Buckley Recital Hall, Amherst College)

On Friday, a handful of Bostonians braved the sleet to appraise their reflected image at Jordan Hall, at least as posited by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and conductor Gil Rose. “Boston Accents’’ collected works by a quartet of local composers, and while the intent was (with one exception) not particularly parochial, and the musical results awfully disparate, one could glean crucial elements of the city’s self-regard.

Pride in innovation, for instance. David Sanford’s “Black Noise,’’ a world premiere, refracted a cutting-edge focus on sonic exploration through a roiling, rumbling engagement with jazz. Keening clusters and tolling horns coruscated with edge and effect, like washes of light reflected off a cityscape’s hard and glassy surfaces. A shambolic outburst of harp, double-bass, and cello pizzicato sparked a pressing, surging crowd of jam-session counterpoint, the orchestra roaring forth. Sanford reimagines the precise detail of latter-day European modernism as a quintessentially American profusion: insistent, unyielding, stubborn, seductive.

John Harbison’s 2009 Double Concerto, for its part, privileged the Bostonian exaltation of reason, in the logical motivic discourse between orchestra and soloists (violinist Miranda Cuckson and cellist Julia Bruskin, well-matched in their clearly enunciated eloquence), in the way musical surprises — a sudden blanket from the orchestra, a sudden rhythmic insistence from the soloists — prompted smooth reassessments in the argument: an expanding web of citation. The reward was a highly intellectualized hoedown of a finale.

The area’s revered past fueled Eric Sawyer’s 2013 “Fantasy Concerto: Concord Conversations,’’ pianist Andrea Lam joining Cuckson and Bruskin, channeling three Transcendentalists — Ralph Waldo Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott — consulting with themselves and the orchestra’s universe. It was a romanticized, twice (and more)-told tale, the music, like the history, establishing tropes, laying down seemingly evident lines.

And finally, perhaps, a bit of the city’s protest-too-much insistence that it does have a fun side — though Ronald Perera’s “The Saints’’ was great fun indeed. A concise deconstruction of “When the Saints Go Marching In’’ spanning a pocket concerto for orchestra, electronics-enhanced compositional play, and some respectable symphonic second-lining (including a proficiently primed audience sing-along), “The Saints,’’ in design and performance, illustrated the evening’s other virtues: invention, craft, judicious renewal of commonplaces. As travel so often does, Perera’s New Orleans jaunt crystallized the virtues of home.

Boston Modern Orchestra Project;

“Boston Accents,’’ Music of Sanford, Harbison, Sawyer, and Perera; Gil Rose, artistic director

At: Jordan Hall, Friday (repeats April 2 at Buckley Recital Hall, Amherst College)

Matthew Guerrieri can be reached at matthewguerrieri@gmail.com.