A Stockton, N.J., composer’s composition will have its premiere performance with the Hunterdon Symphony with “Music Déjà Vu” this weekend.
Along with Beethoven’s “Pastoral” and Stravinski’s Pulcinella Suite, the first movement of W.I. Mokriski’s Symphony No. 4, “Triumfante” is on the program.
The composer is 15 years old and a sophomore at South Hunterdon Regional High School, Lambertville, N.J. He is known to friends and family as Iggy, short for Ignacio, his middle name.
Iggy lives in Stockton Borough, next to the elementary school that closed its doors to students at the end of the 2018 school year. He attended that school until “it had only about 12 kids in the whole school.”
Born in Portugal – Iggy’s mother is Portugese – he lived in New York and attended the East Village Community School before moving to New Jersey. He studied “little kid piano” with his brother, Leo, for a few years but later moved on to jazz pianist Neil Podgorski, well known in the jazz world and a resident of Pipersville.
But Iggy is drawn to classical music and learning from computer software, he writes in a style reminiscent of Mozart.
His talent has not gone unnoticed. Robert Maggio, extensively published and performed Lambertville composer and professor at West Chester University’s Wells College of Music, has taken Iggy under his wing. “He’s helped guide me a lot,” Iggy said. “He came to meet me at a football game.”
And South Hunterdon Band Director Gabriel Stephens, Iggy said, is “super good, super encouraging.” Iggy plays saxophone in the school’s marching band and piano in the concert band and he is learning to play the oboe – “very difficult.” He was wearing a South Hunterdon Marching Band T-shirt the day I met him.
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