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Reviews of CD 36
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Outstanding American Late-Romantic Music by Nicolas Flagello
The music of Nicolas Flagello (1928-1994) has been having something of a renaissance in recent years after many years of
shameful neglect. He is a member of that group of American Romantics that includes such composers as Samuel Barber and
Gian Carlo Menotti and was a master of lyricism, expressive emotional content and form. This disc of orchestral music
(including six orchestral songs) contains convincing exemplars of his abilities. It is largely thanks to musicologist
Walter Simmons, an expert on the music of Flagello and the producer of this disc, that this recording came about. Simmons
supplied the very helpful booklet notes. The National Radio Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, a veteran of recordings of
twentieth century American orchestral music, is conducted sensitively by John McLaughlin Williams, a specialist in
Romantic American music. The music is presented in roughly chronological order of their composition from the 1951
'Symphonic Aria' to the two arias 'Polo I and II' from 1979 and 1980.
The big piece here is Flagello's Violin Concerto, played by Elmar Oliveira who had recorded the composer's 'Credendum' on an earlier disc. Written in 1956 but because there seemed to be no interest in it, it was never orchestrated. The Flagello estate asked composer/editor Anthony Sbordoni to orchestrate it and he has done a masterful job. The concerto is in the usual three movements. I is based primarily on a minor key theme introduced initially by lightly accompanied violin; its dominating interval is a falling fourth. Oliveira plays the movement's fearsomely difficult cadenza with aplomb. II is an example of Flagello's special ability for writing ineffably sad and lyrical slow movements -- on this recording that description also fits the 'Symphonic Aria' and the interlude from his operas 'Mirra' and 'The Sisters' as well as several of the songs. ('The Sisters', I've just learned, will be staged at Hunter College next month, its first production since the early 1960s. Involved in the production are Susan Gonzalez, the soprano heard on this disc, who is singing a role as well as staging the Hunter College production, and the aforementioned Anthony Sbordoni. I wish I could attend it as I find the heart-breakingly beautiful Interlude from this opera to be my favorite selection on this disc. Its delicate bitonal splashes of woodwind color cause a frisson every time I hear them.) The concerto's third movement is a brilliant rondo which is both stunningly virtuosic and emotionally expressive. Oliveira conveys both the sadness of II and the brilliance of I and III with musical assurance and eloquence.
There are two orchestral movements from the 1955 opera 'Mirra': the previously mentioned Interlude and a wildly frenzied 'Dance' vaguely reminiscent of similar movements by Bartók or Stravinsky.
After the Violin Concerto come the six orchestral songs. 'The Rainy Day', is set to Longfellow's familiar poem containing the famous concluding lines, 'Into each life some rain must fall / Some days must be dark and dreary'. 'The Brook' (1958) sets poetry by Tennyson. The line 'I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance' reminds one of a similar passage in the Act IV quintet in Barber's 'Vanessa' ('To leave, to break, to find, to keep') written the same year. 'Ruth's Aria' from Flagello's final opera 'Beyond the Horizon' based on the O'Neill play is another lament: 'I now know what I did not know before: / The wounds of mind, and heart, and soul'. Gonzalez's communication of the emotions of this and the other arias is a marvel of vocal acting.
The disc concludes with three more orchestral songs. 'Canto' is a dramatic, anguished scena set to Flagello's own Italian text. 'Polo I' and 'Polo II' -- we are told that a 'polo' is a 'genre of flamenco song of Arabian origin' -- are songs of farewell to life and love. These, too, are sung marvelously by Gonzalez in Sbordoni's brilliant orchestrations.
On the booklet's cover is a beautiful painting by Flagello himself! Full texts are provided for the songs. One cannot offer praise high enough for the music and the performances on this disc, a shining example of the loving presentation of the highest order of works by a composer whose fame and acclaim can only grow as a result.
Strongly recommended.
- Scott Morrison
MusicWeb International review:
The American composer Flagello was the model late-romantic composer. His own ideals are instantly evident from his music which in this selection includes a mix of operatic interludes, arias, songs and the Violin Concerto.
One might pretty loosely group Flagello with Barber, Giannini and Menotti. Take the Symphonic Aria. This has a magnificently claustrophobic intensity close to the psychologically complex moments of torment in Barber's opera Vanessa. This is music that broods magnificently with searing strings and gloomy ostinati. The Interlude and Dance from the opera Mirra recall the contrast between Barber's Meditation and Dance of Vengeance from Medea. The Dance is barbaric and full of propulsive and irritable grit. The Interlude from his opera The Sisters is gloomy and intensely romantic, with a ticking figure heavy with threat. The music rises to one of those decaying Hollywood climaxes one associates with nervy heroines and desperate hours.
The three movement Violin Concerto is a capricious and troubled work with a virtuoso solo line. The music is emotionally tempestuous and should appeal to anyone who enjoys the Barber or Menotti concertos. The andante con moto attains peace with Oliveira's violin whistlingly high in the register and confidingly quiet. The finale pounds away with plenty of rhythmic interest for orchestra and soloist amid reminiscences of the early movements. Some genuinely exciting Tchaikovskian writing distinguishes the final spiccato-spattered alla polacca pages.
The remainder of the disc is taken up with songs for soprano and orchestra. Typically gloomy texts abound: “… and the day is dark and dreary” – not a million miles from Poe. The mood is uncannily close to Bernard Herrmann's more subdued scores. The Brook is a true concentrated scena with a magnificently operatic pulse and trajectory. The brooding Ruth's Aria is from Act III of the Eugene O'Neill opera Beyond the Horizon. Its Puccinian tension and release is truly potent. Canto sets another of the composer's own poems – clearly a tortured soul. Polo I and II are in much the same vein except here shot through with flamenco conflagration; think of the flamenco echoes in Falla’s El Amor Brujo and add an explosive tattoo of Stravinskian fire.
Rather like Martinu and Moeran, Flagello has a distinctive voice and once you are tuned in you will want everything there is. This disc is not perhaps the place to start. For an introduction go to the First Piano Concerto on Naxos 8.559296, the First Symphony on Naxos 8.559148 or the Piano Concertos 2 and 3 on Artek AR-0002-2. If you are already hooked then the present disc is indispensable … but when will we get to hear one of Flagello’s operas complete?
- Rob Barnett
FANFARE review:
Previous issues in Walter Simmons’s groundbreaking series of Flagello productions featured distinguished performers resurrecting—idiomatically and with aplomb—major works: for instance, his First Symphony and Theme, Variations, and Fugue (Naxos 8.559148, Fanfare 27:1), the Second and Third Piano Concertos (Artek 2, Fanfare 23:1, 23:2), the First Piano Concerto and the Concerto sinfonico for saxophone quartet and orchestra (Naxos 8.559296, Fanfare 30:3). Those are works of startling expressive power, exhilarating in their essentially tragic outlook. With the latter issue we began to be introduced to Flagello’s vocal works, given with Susan Gonzalez’s stridently edged soprano.
The songs included here, originally for piano and voice or left in short score and orchestrated by Anthony Sbordoni, present the listener with the conundrum of a major composer (and talented painter, represented by the album cover) tone deaf, so to speak, to the warp of words and the woof of meaning. The Rainy Day, for instance, inflates Longfellow’s innocuous, incipiently bathetic lament (“Thy fate is the common fate of all/Into each life some rain must fall”) to bleakly cataclysmic proportions, while The Brook, Tennyson’s purling idyll, swells to a veritable Mississippi in Flagello’s apprehension. Nor does it help that Gonzalez sings “smoldering”—which makes no sense—in Longfellow’s line, “The vine still clings to the moldering wall.” As his own poet, whether in English or Italian, Flagello is a verbal contortionist—“I now know what I did not know before: The wounds of mind, and heart, and soul . . .” (Ruth’s Aria). Does this matter? In the last instance, at least, words make verbally explicit the anguish implicit in the music, though at the cost of courting bathos and undercutting the effect. All of these songs would be more effective as orchestral pieces after the manner of the brooding Symphonic Aria opening the program. This is especially true of the two Polo songs. “Polo,” Simmons notes, “is a genre of flamenco song of Arabian origin.” Boppy rhythm lends them a sardonically upbeat cast, belied by their tortured lyrics (“See that if I don’t die/The black misery wears me out”) generating an ambiguity less rich than perplexing. Taken together, the songs leave one wondering how so resourceful a composer—or, perhaps, how so sympathetic a critic, c’est moi—could have taken so many stultifying wrong turns. A still available album (Phoenix 125) issued in 1995 with Flagello conducting the Orchestra Sinfonica di Roma in settings of Byron’s She Walks in Beauty (with Joann Grillo), Emily Brontë’s Remembrance (Maya Randolph), and the Contemplazioni di Michaelangelo (Nancy Tatum), if not sufficiently provocative to set the Tiber alight, nevertheless show an expert matching of manner to matter notably lacking in the present clutch. Given that the songs in the present program were orchestrated by another hand, let us give the composer benefit of the doubt.
The two interludes, from operas composed as Flagello approached 30, play for around seven minutes each and follow a similar pattern of working unmemorable motifs very slowly to a climactic clinch before ebbing away. Neither makes one eager to hear the scenes they join. The brief, brutal Dance from Mirra, on the other hand, suggests pith, sinew, high drama. “The opera is extravagantly romantic in style, brimful of emotional extremes,” Simmons tells us, in his extensive, closely informed notes, “and requires a large orchestra, full chorus, dancers, plus an onstage band.” Perhaps Mirra’s long-drawn Interlude possesses more resonance and impact in the context of the opera, “a horrifying tale of incestuous love within the royal family of ancient Cyprus.” That suggests genuine operatic possibilities.
“Discouraged by the lack of interest in his music, Flagello left many major works, including the
Violin Concerto, in short score, intending to orchestrate them if the opportunity for a performance
appeared. At the time of his death in 1994, quite a few such works remained in short score, so the
Flagello estate engaged the talented composer and music editor Anthony Sbordoni to prepare performing
editions of most of these compositions.” In the Violin Concerto, at least, the upshot is the Flagello
sound, exuberant and glittering—the Violin Concerto seems to have been a particular beneficiary of
the composer’s example in the piano concertos, the second of which preceded it and which the Violin
Concerto’s already characteristic gestures forecast. The two works share a similar, occasionally
explosive, volatility, and an effusive lyricism which seems the utterance of a soul on fire.
Oliveira is hand-in-glove with the composer—there is nothing tentative here, every note tells. If
the first movement is all singing turbulence, the second is another of the composer’s essays in
bleak anguish—bittersweet, hesitant, muted, penetrating. Though not without its thunders and
bizarrerie, the third movement is a relaxed romp propelled by brilliant gaiety, rounding off a
substantial work—and not in length only!—playing just under half-an-hour. And it is for the Violin
Concerto that this album is enthusiastically recommended. Sound is immediate and detailed in a
spacious aural frame allowing Gonzalez and Oliveira palpable dialogue with the orchestra.
- Adrian Corleonis
WWW.CLASSICAL.NET review: "At least one classic work in an effective performance"
The latest disc has arrived from violinist Elmar Oliveira and producer and critic Walter Simmons, both of whom have played major roles in the revival of the music of American composer Nicolas Flagello. Flagello came up in the early and middle Fifties, and his career lasted roughly thirty years. For reasons that have little to do with quality, the musical establishment mainly ignored him. To some extent, this stemmed from the rise of dodecaphony and the avant-garde, but Flagello apparently had a harder time than most. He doesn't seem to have moved in the right circles, even in the right tonal circles. After all, there were tonal composers who still received decent, even prestigious commissions as well as well-established arts organizations desperately looking for the next Blue-Eyed Tonal Hope. Most of Flagello's performances and currency came from his colleagues at the Manhattan School of Music as well as from a series of LPs of his own music he conducted with mainly Italian orchestras. I have no idea who paid for them. Flagello continued to compose to about 1980, when a degenerative brain disease, probably exacerbated by alcoholism, made even routine musical tasks impossible.
Indeed, most of the music on the program has been orchestrated by another hand, composer Anthony Sbordoni. Flagello, an amazingly quick orchestrator, left much of his orchestral music in short score, with the idea that if a performance materialized, he would finish the instrumentation then. Unfortunately, by the time his music had begun to creep into notice again, his brain had deteriorated too far. Hitherto, I've found Sbordoni's results variable, ranging from routine to inspired. Here, he rings the bell every time. Sbordoni, a pupil of the great Louise Talma (another composer who needs revival), admits that he doesn't score like Flagello, and we expect such a thing only unreasonably. It would have been nice to have Flagello's own realizations, but Sbordoni deftly gives you the character of each work, and sometimes a bit more. He definitely knows his way around an orchestra. I'm grateful to him for taking the time.
The Symphonic Aria is a meditative lament – a genre Simmons calls a favorite of the composer's. Flagello takes a simple idea and worries it throughout the piece, building a long arch, with a relatively brief way down at the end. The interlude from the opera Mirra and the "interludio" from the opera The Sisters are different examples of the same general kind of work. In a way, all three meditations remind me of Barber's First Essay and Adagio or, better yet, of Hanson's Merry Mount, with the slow interludes analogous to the "Love Music" and the dance reminiscent of the "Children's Games." Nevertheless, Flagello's music is darker than Hanson's and shows greater psychological complexity. Most of these slow movements seem to lean almost entirely on sequence, supposedly the lowest form of musical development. Yet, like Wagner at his best, they're never boring. One phrase grows inevitably out of another, gradually forming giant spans, and they are dramatic in the primary sense of the word: full of character and conflict. No technique is a priori impure. It depends on which sequences you want to talk about. The "interludio" grips me the most, the most interesting to me both structurally and psychologically. Flagello brings together the three main characters of the opera into this little entr'acte: a brutal father, a yearning daughter, and her jealous sister.
The Violin Concerto stands as the major work on the program. It shares a point of view with the Barber concerto, although for my money, it's as good or maybe better than Barber's (of course, a classic). Its three movements – symphonic allegro-aria-rondo – require a violinist not only with flexible fingers, but solid musicianship and a big tone as well. It is virtuosic, deeply passionate, symphonic in argument, and downright tricky all at once. It's a concerto with an obvious need for a great soloist, a super-Heifetz, perhaps. As in so many of his big works, Flagello paints dark, not simply because of the simple equation that dark=profound, but because of his basic nature. He earns, as they say, everything he wrings out of you, not just because he's written in a minor key. I would say most listeners will be swept by the emotional waves. A few might even be blown away by the hurdles the composer expects the soloist to clear. But this concerto goes beyond simple swoon and flash. Thematically, it is extremely tight, particularly the first movement, a sonata-allegro which plays with two main ideas. The second of these seems an outgrowth of the first, so we get the effect of a monothematic movement of incredible richness. The andante movement, to my ears, reverses variants of the two ideas. The finale is a tilt-a-whirl, a phantasmagorical caprice. The ideas span the unusual to the downright weird, and here and there themes from earlier movements pop up. However, like a thrill ride, Flagello makes sure you hang on. The bizarre doesn't give way to the incomprehensible. Indeed, if it did, the movement wouldn't have such a dangerous, powerful impact. By me, this is one of the great American (perhaps even Modern) concerti. Just consider that this is not only its first recording, but its first performance, and that the composer never heard it.
The rest of the CD fills out with orchestrated songs. All began for voice and piano, but the composer liked to orchestrate his songs as the opportunity arose. For these, with the composer's precedent, Sbordoni supplies the instrumentation. I find it curious that most of these songs don't rise to the level of the instrumental works. After all, Flagello comes up with wonderful tunes all the time in his orchestral pieces. He is an extremely "singable" instrumental composer. Most of the song-tunes derive, I think, from Barber, particularly the Barber of Vanessa and especially the marvelous "Doctor's Aria." Flagello can certainly construct a melody as well as a beautiful arch to a song. However, unlike Barber, he doesn't always choose particularly good texts (he often wrote to his own). There's nothing that keeps a song to a meretricious poem from achieving something great. Brahms and Schubert wrote many with this handicap. Nevertheless, if you have a terrible set of words, I think you need a great melody that overcomes the defect. At any rate, you need something . What's missing in most of these things is that special musical spark that makes you forget you're hearing drivel. Flagello's settings of Tennyson's "Brook" and Longfellow's "Rainy Day" will not revive these poems any time soon. Fortunately, Tennyson's and Longfellow's reputations don't depend on these. I found the main interest for most of the songs in Sbordoni's orchestrations.
The exceptions here prove Flagello's settings of two polos, from late in his career. The polo is a Spanish poetic genre, and Flagello gives his idiom a flamenco tinge. It's enough to put some excitement and unpredictability into the music. The difference in effectiveness from the sad-sack stuff that preceded startled me. Here are two vocal pieces worthy of the interludes and the concerto.
Oliveira gives a knockout performance of the concerto. You also might want to check out his recording of Flagello's Credendum (CD now available on Artek AR-0002-2, another winner; see my review). Susan Gonzalez is a wonderfully dramatic, communicative singer. Her performance of Flagello's Dante's Farewell (Naxos 8.559296) will sear you. Here, however, she's a few cents annoyingly flat, practically throughout. It's not so noticeable with the polos, but it can set your teeth on edge in the more po'-faced songs. Also, her diction is so clear, you can hear her sing the wrong words in the Longfellow ("smoldering" rather than "moldering," the latter much more appropriate to a rainy day). You expect a certain level from someone as distinguished as Oliveira, and he certainly delivers. John McLaughlin Williams, although a relatively young conductor, has an enviable discography so far. I can't praise his work enough. I have no idea how good an orchestra the Ukraine has, but Williams makes it sound very close to top rank. None of these scores has received a recording before – all premieres here – and these guys sound like they've been playing them for years.
- Steve Schwartz
Amazon reviews: "Outstanding American Late-Romantic Music by Nicolas Flagello"
The music of Nicolas Flagello (1928-1994) has been having something of a renaissance in recent years after many years of shameful neglect. He is a member of that group of American Romantics that includes such composers as Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti and was a master of lyricism, expressive emotional content and form. This disc of orchestral music (including six orchestral songs) contains convincing exemplars of his abilities. It is largely thanks to musicologist Walter Simmons, an expert on the music of Flagello and the producer of this disc, that this recording came about. Simmons supplied the very helpful booklet notes. The National Radio Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, a veteran of recordings of twentieth century American orchestral music, is conducted sensitively by John McLaughlin Williams, a specialist in Romantic American music. The music is presented in roughly chronological order of their composition from the 1951 'Symphonic Aria' to the two arias 'Polo I and II' from 1979 and 1980.
The big piece here is Flagello's Violin Concerto, played by Elmar Oliveira who had recorded the composer's 'Credendum' on an earlier disc. Written in 1956 but because there seemed to be no interest in it, it was never orchestrated. The Flagello estate asked composer/editor Anthony Sbordoni to orchestrate it and he has done a masterful job. The concerto is in the usual three movements. I is based primarily on a minor key theme introduced initially by lightly accompanied violin; its dominating interval is a falling fourth. Oliveira plays the movement's fearsomely difficult cadenza with aplomb. II is an example of Flagello's special ability for writing ineffably sad and lyrical slow movements -- on this recording that description also fits the 'Symphonic Aria' and the interlude from his operas 'Mirra' and 'The Sisters' as well as several of the songs. ('The Sisters', I've just learned, will be staged at Hunter College next month, its first production since the early 1960s. Involved in the production are Susan Gonzalez, the soprano heard on this disc, who is singing a role as well as staging the Hunter College production, and the aforementioned Anthony Sbordoni. I wish I could attend it as I find the heart-breakingly beautiful Interlude from this opera to be my favorite selection on this disc. Its delicate bitonal splashes of woodwind color cause a frisson every time I hear them.) The concerto's third movement is a brilliant rondo which is both stunningly virtuosic and emotionally expressive. Oliveira conveys both the sadness of II and the brilliance of I and III with musical assurance and eloquence.
There are two orchestral movements from the 1955 opera 'Mirra': the previously mentioned Interlude and a wildly frenzied 'Dance' vaguely reminiscent of similar movements by Bartók or Stravinsky.
After the Violin Concerto come the six orchestral songs. 'The Rainy Day', is set to Longfellow's familiar poem containing the famous concluding lines, 'Into each life some rain must fall / Some days must be dark and dreary'. 'The Brook' (1958) sets poetry by Tennyson. The line 'I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance' reminds one of a similar passage in the Act IV quintet in Barber's 'Vanessa' ('To leave, to break, to find, to keep') written the same year. 'Ruth's Aria' from Flagello's final opera 'Beyond the Horizon' based on the O'Neill play is another lament: 'I now know what I did not know before: / The wounds of mind, and heart, and soul'. Gonzalez's communication of the emotions of this and the other arias is a marvel of vocal acting.
The disc concludes with three more orchestral songs. 'Canto' is a dramatic, anguished scena set to Flagello's own Italian text. 'Polo I' and 'Polo II' -- we are told that a 'polo' is a 'genre of flamenco song of Arabian origin' -- are songs of farewell to life and love. These, too, are sung marvelously by Gonzalez in Sbordoni's brilliant orchestrations.
On the booklet's cover is a beautiful painting by Flagello himself! Full texts are provided for the songs. One cannot offer praise high enough for the music and the performances on this disc, a shining example of the loving presentation of the highest order of works by a composer whose fame and acclaim can only grow as a result.
Strongly recommended.
- Scott Morrison