If one were to open a great work of literature and notes of music began to flutter above the words, this experience would be the equivalent of Enzo De Rosa’s profoundly human and humanistic CD, NeoKlassic. His complex, unexpected yet traditional melodies extract the subtext, the essence, of Peer Gynt, Candide, 100 Years of Solitude, and more. In the process, he raises timeless ideas of love/death, war/peace, youth/age to the sublime. It’s music as narrator of themes that have driven history, mythology and the arts since the beginning of time, but they are expressed with a graciously crafted rawness at once atonally contemporary and lushly romantic. There are hints of George Balanchine’s/Paul Hindemith’s brooding and angular The Four Temperaments in Candide, or Kurt Jooss’/Fritz Cohen’s chaotic and dirge-like The Green Table in The Yellow and the Pink. Shadings of Shostakovich, Bartok and Stravinsky illuminate passages, especially in The Alchemist. But Maestro De Rosa never remotely approaches pastiche or appropriation. Each piece is wholly original, crafted from experience, observation and the vagaries of the human heart. He exhibits a rare ability to weave the subtle and the tempestuous into an exquisite and elegantly draped fabric of the human condition. – by Lucia Mauro