If 20th-century American music currently has a better friend than Naxos I can’t think who it is. This volume in its American Classics strand spotlights a composer whose music I have heard described as brash, vulgar, gaudy, gimmicky and populist. I think the comments were meant to be adverse criticisms, but personally I’m all for a bit of gaudy gimmickry from time to time, not to mention vulgar vernacular. Michael Daugherty has simply taken another few steps down the path first trodden, albeit with far greater elegance, by Aaron Copland.

Daugherty is an archetypal post-modernist. He doesn’t attempt to fuse high- and low-brow culture, since he gives little sign of accepting that there is any meaningful distinction between them: everything is grist to his melting pot, if I may mix my metaphors in a po-mo sort of way. He has written works paying tribute to a wide range of cultural heroes, villains and institutions, from I Love Lucy to spaghetti westerns, from Hell’s Angels to Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Barbie. Here his subjects are Philadelphia, incorporating a homage to Stokowski, and UFOs, but the influences and allusions are considerably wider, from Bach to film noir and beyond.

His language is often complex (difficult time-signatures and canonic variations for example) and he sometimes adopts and adapts modernist vocabulary, but the result is highly accessible. It may be too coarse and raucous for some tastes, but it is always great fun. UFO was written for Glennie, and she has already recorded a version for Klavier. For Naxos she again negotiates all the technical obstacles and hurdles with her usual insouciance and apparent ease.