Copland’s score for the ballet Grohg dates from the time of his studies with Nadia Boulanger in the early 1920s. Inspired by the German expressionistic horror film Nosferatu, a loose adaption of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the ballet features a vampire who likes to raise the dead in order to dance with them. With little prospect of a performance, Copland arranged the opening Cortège macabre as a concert work and used some of the remaining material in his Dance Symphony (1928) and the ballet Hear Ye! Hear Ye! (1934). Although revised by the composer in 1932, the score was thought to be lost until a copy was found in the Library of Congress in the late 1980s by Oliver Knussen.

It’s a strikingly assured composition, contrasting passages of menace, grotesquery, rambunctiousness and rhythmic complexity, albeit occasionally revealing an indebtedness to the works of Bartók, Schmitt and Stravinsky. Knussen’s own 1992 recording with the Cleveland Orchestra on Argo (now Decca) is extraordinarily fine but Slatkin’s incisive and powerful performance is also strongly recommendable. The recording quality of the Argo version, however, is considerably superior to the rather airless and hard-edged presentation of the orchestra on this Naxos release.

The original score of Billy the Kid features around 12 minutes of music omitted from the more familiar suite, including an attractive waltz towards the end of the ballet that depicts Billy with his girlfriend. The complete score has been recorded by a number of conductors, including Zinman, Litton and Slatkin himself (with the St Louis Symphony Orchestra). Slatkin’s new version is as fine as any in terms of its execution, characterisation and involvement but once again the attractiveness of the performance is undermined by the dry and unsympathetic recording quality.