I rather enjoy “neo” music composed long after its idiom was overtaken by other styles (or fads!). Gerald Finzi’s late Cello Concerto, composed under the shadow of death, certainly fits the neo-romantic description, along with Barber’s Violin Concerto and Rachmaninov’s Third Symphony. Initial reviews of the Finzi Concerto were scathing: “The harmonic language and thematic character give no hint of what has been happening in music during the last 40 years” while the New Statesman thundered that “conceived and executed so much under the shadow of Elgar [that] only by courtesy can it be called a new work at all.”

Well, I cleave to the view of another commentator who wrote “anything by Finzi...