Classical music nuts like me will applaud when they learn about composer Marcel Tyberg. Fred Flaxman’s 175th “Compact Discovery” was a huge discovery for me. Flaxman’s remarks sketch the sad story of Tyberg’s 50 years on this planet followed by his extermination in Auschwitz.

In describing Tyberg’s symphonic music, Flaxman is accurate in saying that it has “the power of Mahler.” In fact, the excerpt from Tyberg’s Third Symphony, premiered by the Buffalo Philharmonic, has the grandiosity, if not the maddeningly soulful unforgettability, of The Great Gustav. If you didn’t know that Mahler wrote ten symphonies, you might mistake Tyberg’s music for a long-lost eleventh Mahlerian extravaganza. For that matter, Tyberg’s symphonic style brings to mind Bruckner, even a bit of Sibelius.

If this isn’t enough, Flaxman is right on target when he says that excerpts from Tyberg’s Piano Trio in F come close to Brahms and Schumann. Closer, I think, to Schumann than to Brahms, mainly because Tyberg lacked Brahms’s stringent—though lush (and again soulful)—economy.

Not to nitpick too much. If Tyberg ends up sounding, for me, like a minor composer—an epigone echoing the Great Masters—he’s majorly good, even terrific: whistle-worthily melodic, sturm-und-drangishly dramatic. Tyberg is everything you’ll want to hear on an autumnal evening, with Halloween scarifying the air and Flaxman lighting up your mood like a jack-o-lantern.