American composer Nicolas Flagello felt like a fish out of water in the musical atmosphere of his day. Finding his voice in a mildly modernist, mostly post-Romantic idiom around 1950, Flagello endured marginalization of his music as what Berthold Goldschmidt once called "the Webern-Stockhausen mafia" ruled the roost in Western music. Flagello succumbed to a degenerative disease before the thaw toward more expressive, and less technical, kinds of compositions began to set in. This is an interesting and to some extent tragic ...
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American composer Nicolas Flagello felt like a fish out of water in the musical atmosphere of his day. Finding his voice in a mildly modernist, mostly post-Romantic idiom around 1950, Flagello endured marginalization of his music as what Berthold Goldschmidt once called "the Webern-Stockhausen mafia" ruled the roost in Western music. Flagello succumbed to a degenerative disease before the thaw toward more expressive, and less technical, kinds of compositions began to set in. This is an interesting and to some extent tragic story, but should we listen? Naxos American Classics' Nicolas Flagello: Piano Concerto No. 1 attempts to put forth the best face on Flagello, whose music has received a great deal more attention in the wake of his death than it ever did during his lifetime, albeit on labels much less prominent than Naxos.The highlight of the disc is the premiere recording of Flagello's final composition, Concerto Sinfonico (1985) for saxophone quartet and orchestra, not because of any sentiment...
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