To quote Walter Simmons’ informative booklet notes, ‘Nicolas
Flagello was one of the last American composers to pursue
traditional romantic musical values, intensified by modernist
innovations in harmony and rhythm, but without the irony
or detachment of postmodernism.’ He was active during the
post-WWII years and his music certainly has attractions.
Inevitably with a piano pitted against a full-size conventional
symphony orchestra and the words ‘traditional romantic’ ringing
in one’s ears, Rachmaninov - dead just seven years when Flagello
wrote his first piano concerto - will, and does, spring to
mind. There may not be a continual flow of melody, but the
slow movement, a melancholy nocturne, is full of tenderness
ending beautifully. The finale is rhythmically vital incorporating
a scherzo in its conventionally structured sonata form, hemiolas popping
up all over the place and there is a reminiscence of the
strongly defined first movement to bring a tidy cyclical
shape to the whole. The Serbian pianist Tatjana Rankovich
impresses in this formidable account, for to play it is as
hard as it sounds, while she gets solid support from the
National Radio Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine under John McLaughlin
Williams. This is an impressive start to this disc.
Curiously Rachmaninov immediately springs to mind once
again, this time his Isle of the Dead, at the start
of Flagello’s Dante’s Farewell, a dramatic monologue.
It has a wonderfully atmospheric start, dark-hued colours
and a beguiling solo violin. Flagello was a pragmatic composer
and left much of his music in short score until a performance
was forthcoming. With a more fallow period of rare appearances
in concert programmes, it inevitably left a lot of works
unfinished at his death, at least in terms of realisation
in orchestral format. In 2003 Anthony Sbordini was commissioned
by the composer’s family to score this scena, and
the result is highly satisfactory for he is clearly in tune
with Flagello’s now more mature style. Not a cheerful piece,
this text entitled Gemma Donati by Joseph Tusiani,
recounts a nightmare vision that came to Dante warning him
of danger to Florence and his painful decision to abandon
his wife and children and leave for Rome, never to return.
Susan Gonzalez has a widely coloured voice, a rich lower
register and thrilling top and the work allows full rein
to her talents.
The disc does not have much cheerful music, and the Concerto
sinfonico is no exception. Flagello had a degenerative
disease for his last nine years, this work being the last
completed and which he composed at the start of this sad
period. Its attraction lies in the blend of four saxophones
in stark contrast to the full symphony orchestra, but there
is a wonderful moment of lyrical introspection in the first
movement (five minutes in) before more grimness sets in.
Clearly Flagello was a craftsman in musical concept and
expression. Despite some occasional awkward tuning amongst
it, the New Hudson Saxophone Quartet accompanied by the
Rutgers Symphony Orchestra under Kynan Johns do the work
proud.
Christopher Fifield
see also review by Rob Barnett (Recording of the Month -
July 2006)
BUY NOW
Tatjana Rankovich
(piano); Susan Gonzalez (soprano) 
