Nicolas Flagello
      Orchestral Works

*  Symphony No. 1
*  Sea Cliffs
*  The Piper of Hamelin: Intermezzo
*  Theme, Variations, and Fugue

Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra/David Amos
Naxos 8.559148 Total time: 63:49

Summary for the Busy Executive: Rolling thunder.

Nicolas Flagello, born in 1928 into a musical family (his brother Ezio
had a very successful operatic career; you can hear him, among many
other places, on Leinsdorf's Verdi Requiem and on Boehm's Don Giovanni),
unfortunately was born a little late. He caught very few breaks in his
career.  He came to notice in the late Forties and early Fifties, and
his music shares affinities with Piston and Mennin.  By that time, of
course, post-Webernian serialism was emerging as the dominant idiom of
the academy, so the academy and the journals associated with it largely
ignored Flagello's work.  Flagello hung around the periphery of my
consciousness during the Sixties, with a series of recordings on small
labels.  I remember feeling vaguely beneficent toward the music, but
nothing really grabbed me then.  We like to think of ourselves as
recognizing quality immediately, but that inner bell - unless attached
to a brand name - seldom rings for me.  I tend to need many encounters
with a composer or a work. I admit I returned to Flagello only recently
and only because of the Internet advocacy of Walter Simmons, who for a
very long time has taught me an awful lot about American music.

Flagello didn't help his career much.  He had bouts of depression,
showed serious ambivalence toward his work, and engaged in self-destructive
behavior which resulted, among other things, in alcoholism, wrecked
marriages, and finally (in my opinion) degenerative disease.  Although
he died in 1994, he had been unable to compose or even to notate music
since around 1985.  He died in a nursing home. There was so little
interest in Flagello's music while he *could* compose, that he left many
of his works in short score - with the idea that if a date materialized,
he would then orchestrate.  Ironically, interest in his music began to
rise in the Eighties.  Some things he got to, but his health problems
essentially put paid to the scheme.  Consequently, many works remained
in short score.  At least one has been orchestrated by another hand.
Nevertheless, over the past few years, more recordings have appeared.
With this Naxos CD, part of their "American Classics" series, more people
can take a chance.

At his best, Flagello stands with the best the United States has.
Unfortunately, I find the quality of his music variable.  He's wonderful
with the big, serious statement.  Often, however, he has trouble with
small forms, as with two items on this program.  Sea Cliffs, for example,
he composed for a recording series of "light classics" arranged for
strings, which he also conducted.  Considering that context, I suppose,
I seem a patronizing grouch.  But I happen to enjoy light classics.
Compare Sea Cliffs to, say, "Morning" from Grieg's Peer Gynt and you get
struck by its lack of melodic or harmonic memorability.  It goes along
pleasantly, it's not complete dreck, but you don't want to give it RAM
in your mental Ipod, either.  The intermezzo from Flagello's opera for
children, The Piper of Hamelin, is no worse than many Verdi intermezzi,
and it probably serves the complete opera very well.  I missed, however,
the strength of Barber's act IV intermezzo from Vanessa or even the
"Adoration" from Flagello's own Judgment of St.  Francis that allows
it to stand on its own.

Still, those items take up very little time.  The major works - Symphony
No.  1 and Theme, Variations, and Fugue - show Flagello at the height
of his game.  I consider the symphony one of the great Modernist American
symphonies, at the level of the Barber First or the Piston Fourth.  It
doesn't sound like either one, however.  It's an incredibly difficult
work to bring off - full of counterpoint at a Hindemithian level of
complexity, changing meters, and subtly powerful argument.  Flagello
admired the Brahms Fourth, and his admiration shows.  The thematic
argument spans movements (much of the material for entire symphony derives
from the opening measures).  Flagello runs the danger of sameness, of
going to the well too often, but he always eludes it.  The piece deserves
a detailed analysis, but such a thing would mean little to most readers,
since they haven't heard the work.  Furthermore, all that analysis would
come to naught if the piece didn't yield an emotional payoff.  One of
the marvelous features of the symphony is that the listener needn't know
the technical details to get caught up in its emotional power: turbulent,
uneasy, and ardent.  The passacaglia finale (although Flagello calls it
a chaconne) is one of the finest I've heard.  It gives the Brahms Fourth
a run for its money, although the Brahms is even more focused.  The
Theme, Variations, and Fugue Flagello wrote during his studies with the
Italian composer Pizzetti.  Nevertheless, you couldn't call Flagello a
beginner, since he had already written several large works.  "Advanced
studies" is more like it.  Some of the variations are strict, some free.
However, you don't think in terms of individual variations, but of a
dramatic structure which encompasses the entire piece.  Flagello grabs
you by the collar and never lets go.  The fugue - which builds from first
to last bar - crowns the whole thing, after working you into a lather
with virtuosic use of stretto (one voice of the fugue entering before
another has finished).  With Flagello, the time between entries grows
smaller and smaller.  By the way, he follows the same strategy in the
symphony finale.  Above all, Flagello writes entire movements, rather
than sections of movements strung together, and the listener tends to
experience them as such.

These are works that take more than one listening and more than one
performance to achieve anything close to a true appreciation of their
worth.  Amos and his band go far enough, so that you know you're dealing
with something special, but you know both works can deliver more.  The
performances are good enough - indeed, almost amazing, when you consider
the music's difficulty - but only for now.  The Bratislava band has
noticeable problems with the symphony's first movement - the meter
changes, the counterpoint - and seem to hang on by their fingernails.
You long for sharper rhythms and attacks.  Nevertheless, Amos has always
had the ability to present music in long spans, so he takes to Flagello
like ducks to soup.  Recommended.

Steve Schwartz