Search - Nicolas Flagello, John McLaughlin Williams, Kynan Johns :: Nicolas Flagello: Piano Concerto No. 1; Dante's Farewell; Concerto Sinfonico

"A" Material from Flagello

Eugene G. Barnes | Dunn Loring, VA USA | 08/06/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is about my fifth foray into the music of Nicolas Flagello (Metropolitan Opera bass Ezio Flagello's brother, if the name sounds familiar), and after listening to it, I'm sure I'll be adding even more Flagello to my collection in the future.



The low price and interesting sounding program that originally attracted me to this disc did not prepare me for the high quality of the music's content, the vitality and commitment of the performances, and the sweet fullness of the recorded sound. There's an odd bonus of a painting by Flagello on the cover depicting the Amalfi Coast that looks eerily like the view of Toledo by El Greco.



The 29-minute Piano Concerto No. 1 has a pleasing similarity to the soundworld of Sam Barber's (much later) Piano Concerto, only Barber's is more dissonant. Flagello wrote two more piano concertos after this one, and, good as they are, they are not nearly so striking as his first. And this is a student composition, Flagello's first large-scale work. If most college degree requirement music aims at presenting forward looking musical ideas within a traditional, accessible context, this little baby must have knocked his professors' socks off. Bold, confident writing for the piano is combined with a sureness of hand in the orchestration that is nothing short of remarkable. Serbian/American pianist Tatjana Rankovich has already recorded Flagello's 2nd and 3rd concertos and some of his solo piano music. Her playing in this recording is mostly exemplary, although I could have wished for a bit better articulation in some runs about 11 minutes into the piece. And that horn solo in the second movement could have been a bit more in tune. Quibbles, really; pay no attention to my whining.



The second piece, the 14-minute "Dante's Farewell" for Soprano and Orchestra, is a tightly packed setting of a portion of an English-language monologue by Joseph Tusiani about Dante leaving his wife for his final trip to Rome, never to return. The dread and resignation mixed with moments of transcendent beauty are reminiscent of Mahler's final "Lied von der Erde," "The Farewell." Susan Gonzalez, who sang the premiere, is a bit too closely mic'd for my complete comfort and winds up sounding a bit harsh at times, but she's spot on in interpretation. The NRSO, Ukraine, under J.M. Williams gives us a scintillating performance of Anthony Sbordini's idiomatic orchestration produced from Flagello's short score.



For the final work on the CD, the 23-minute Concerto Sinfonico for Sax Quartet and Orchestra, Naxos switches to the Rutgers SO under Kynan Johns. Their strings are occasionally a little weak when exposed, but they deliver a convincing, full-bodied performance nonetheless of this long dark Nachtmusik of the soul. Flagello uses the sax quartet as Ralph Vaughan-Williams might, leaving the jazz ethos far behind and concentrating on exploiting their timbre in a completely classical context, where they sound ominous but luminous.



Sometimes it's hard to choose from the "trunkload" of titles available in Naxos' American Classics series of CDs. This should be an easy one to say "yes" to."

Flagello's "Film-Noir" Concerto

Thomas F. Bertonneau | Oswego, NY United States | 06/29/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The Naxos American Music series has returned to listener awareness many long-lost scores and revived notice of a number of unjustly discarded composers. The present disc is the second issued by Naxos to document the work of the mid-Twentieth Century Italian-American master Nicolas Flagello (1928 - 1994). A previous disc featured Flagello's impressive First Symphony (1968) and two or three shorter works; the present one offers three equally ambitious scores including the composer's last completed work, a Concerto Sinfonico (1985) for Saxophone Quartet and Orchestra. All are debut recordings. Like Paul Creston and Vittorio Giannini, New Yorker Flagello stemmed from Italian immigration to the United States in the late Nineteenth Century; like many Italians, the members of the Flagello family were domestically musical and they appreciated opera and symphony as integral parts of the civilized life to which they saw themselves as belonging. Like his fellow traditionalist composers, Flagello resisted doctrinaire modernism and worked out his own richly lyrical, yet often harmonically complex idiom; he sustained his determination to speak directly to non-specialist audiences from the inception of his compositional career right through to its end, when he had to fight against the ravages of a humiliating disease in order to ink the last crotchet in his final score.



Producer Walter Simmons has arranged the program in chronological order, starting with Flagello's graduation piece, his Piano Concerto No. 1 (1950), played here by Tatjana Rankovich (keyboard) and the National Radio Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, who, by the way, grasp Flagello's big-muscled Gotham-City idiom like natives to the subway and skyscrapers born. The Ukrainians have the benefit, both in the Concerto and in "Dante's Farewell" (1962), of an American conductor, John McLaughlin Williams, who also seems to have imbibed Flagello into his bones and marrow. Flagello understood what a Twentieth Century neo-romantic piano concerto in the manner of Rachmaninov or Prokofiev is supposed to do: make big, cinematic gestures and "tell a conflict-story" musically. Flagello's Concerto does just this, especially in its large-scale opening movement. Only twenty-two when he composed the work, the Flagello the novice composer naturally exhibits what critics like to call influences. I hear the Russian keyboard composers, certainly, but I also hear Ernest Bloch (Concerto Symphonique) and Alexander Scriabin (Divine Poem), the latter especially in a trumpet-solo about halfway through the movement. An imbalance between the first movement, which clocks in at fifteen minutes, and the two others, which together do not quite add up to fifteen minutes, mars the Concerto, but in an odd way this flaw actually vindicates the first movement. Having drawn listeners into his persuasive esthetic "duration," he then lets them down a bit by failing to sustain the grandness of his architecture. One wants more from the finale than one gets; one wants what one gets in spades in the first movement. It is exciting music throughout even so.



"Dante's Farewell" (1962) is a cantata of sorts for soprano and orchestra, unperformed in Flagello's lifetime and left by him in piano short-score only. For the purpose of the present recording, composer Anthony Sbordini, thoroughly steeped in Flagello's sense of instrumentation, has orchestrated the score. The cantata sets a poem concerning the Thirteenth-Century Florentine poet's flight-in-exile from his native city, where a rival political faction had seized the polity and was exercising its power of vendetta on various notables. The winners, it seems, write not only the history books, but also the residence permits. "Dante's Farewell" has something in common with vocal-orchestral works by Gian Carlo Menotti, Charles Koechlin, and Flagello's older New York compatriot Vittorio Giannini; what Flagello has fashioned corresponds to a hybrid of dramatic "scena" in the Eighteenth-Century manner and symphonic poem in the Nineteenth Century manner. An ambitious soprano might make a stunner of a concert-program by pairing "Dante's Farewell" with Menotti's "Orfeo," Koechlin's "Sommeil de Canope," or Giannini's "Medead." The musical language of "Dante's Farewell" resembles that of the last: it is heavily chromatic and expressionist in idiom although it is not quite so rabid or strenuous a work as "Medead." Vocal soloist Susan Gonzalez does a fine job of enunciating the words. The Ukrainians again play in good form.



The cynosure of this program must be the Concerto Sinfonico, a score that proves that non-serial music can be as effectively haunted and surreal as anything by Schoenberg or Berg in their respective avant-garde moods. Other composers have written concerted works for the saxophone. Ingolf Dahl and Henry Brant both honored the instrument. Fewer have composed for saxophone quartet and orchestra, but this daunting task Flagello undertook at the end of his life while heroically resisting the onset of a dementia-producing affliction. A masterly work on a large scale, the Concerto Sinfonico achieves the effective balance among its three movements of which the Piano Concerto No. 1 falls short. The adjective "symphonic" in this score's Italianate title accurately describes it: this is more a symphony with soloists than a standard display concerto. (It nevertheless calls for devilishly accomplished solo players.) The first movement had me thinking, as I listened to it, of early 1950s "films-noirs," with their paranoid scenes of nocturnal big-city pursuit down seedy alleyways in Skid Row. Flagello has assimilated jazz-syncopations and jazz-like melody into this complex, contrapuntal, and constantly emotionally shifting movement. In the 1960s, they would have compared this music to the nightmare of a bad acid trip. The four saxophones constitute a single "super-soloist" whose raucous and reedy instrumental color contrasts strongly with the monochrome of the string-and-tympani-dominated orchestral background. (There are also a few woodwinds, but I do not think that my ears detected any brass; to extend the cinematic metaphor, imagine that this is indeed a black-and-white "tough guy" film with only the doomed protagonist appearing in subdued sepia-like color.) The middle movement offers some relief from the high tension, only to yield again to the atmosphere of a lethal chase in the fury-goaded finale. The members of the New Hudson Saxophone Quartet join with the Rutgers Symphony Orchestra, once more under the commanding baton of Maestro Williams.



The Concerto Sinfonico is a real "find." If I were a classical-music disc jockey, I would program it during the ten-to-midnight slot on a Saturday late evening, sandwiching it between (let us say) George Rochberg's equally maniacal Second Symphony and Miklos Rosza's paranoid score for "The Lost Weekend." I might read some paragraphs from Franz Kafka in between just to ratchet up the Angst. As Naxos has been restoring to circulation some CDs from the discontinued Koch line of American music, maybe its powers will see their way to reissuing Flagello's Martin Luther King Requiem. That would be nice for music-lovers. But buy this disc now!

"

Gorgeous stuff

WalpoleBassMan | 07/25/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"another superb recording by John M. Williams and the NRSU. big, unapologetically romantic. The Sax Quartet performance is rough with some mediocre ensemble playing (is it the conductor - K. Johns - the orchestra - Rutgers Univ?) but I have to give it 5 stars anyway because the piece is so great.

By the way, if you don't have any of Williams' other recordings on Naxos be sure to check them out - he is one of the top interpreters of American 20th C. music around. I would love to hear him conducting some of the top-tier American orchestras."