Nicolas Flagello (1928-1994)
Piano Concerto No. 1 • Dante's Farewell • Concerto Sinfonico

 

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. For Flagello music was a personal medium for spiritual and emotional expression, not a fashionable position during the post-World War II years when his creative personality was crystallizing, so his music gained little attention. Yet he held fast to his ideals throughout his life, producing a large and varied body of work that includes six operas, two symphonies, eight concertos, and numerous other works, of which much remained unperformed at the time of his death. With the greater tolerance of stylistic diversity that appeared during the latter decades of the twentieth century, however, Flagello's music began finding an increasingly sympathetic a