This release coincides with the reissue of ‘Hanson Conducts Hanson’, a four-CD set on the old Mercury label. Hanson was a skilled conductor and his recordings are indispensable documents, though one’s listening pleasure is hampered somewhat by the Eastman-Rochester Orchestra’s lack of tonal weight and refinement. Hanson’s lush, neo-romantic style demands richer, sweeter sounds. Luckily, that’s just what the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra offer.

Interpretatively speaking, it seems that Kunzel has made a close study of Hanson’s performances, for his approach is similarly incisive. Indeed, Kunzel’s Romantic Symphony may be tauter and more propulsive than Hanson’s own. Even the lyrical pages unfold with a sense of resolve and the conductor’s refusal to draw out the rhetorical, brassy outbursts of the Symphony’s outer movements mitigates the music’s occasional tendency towards pomposity. Slatkin’s account with the St Louis Symphony is more sumptuously cinematic but I’d wager that Kunzel gets closer to the music’s true spirit.

Another reason to favour the Telarc disc is that it includes the premiere recording of the Bold Island Suite (1961), an atmospheric, tuneful and typically clear-headed tone-poem. The Suite from the opera Merry Mount was recorded with more bite and sonorous weight by Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony but Kunzel’s lighter touch in the ‘Love Duet’ movement is to be preferred. Warmly recommended to devotees of orchestral Americana.