The ‘Symphonette’ was Morton Gould’s tongue-in-cheek updating of the ‘Sinfonietta’ to create smaller, American-style orchestral works in a lighter vein than the symphonies of Copland and Harris that were starting to emerge in the 1930s. Gould came to regret his hybrid title, which went the way of ‘kitchenette’ and similar terms as a byword for up-to-the-minute modernism that rapidly became outmoded. Gould’s music, however, never fell into the trap that the title did – these are just sinfoniettas, after all – and became deservedly popular as immaculately crafted light-music classics.

No 1 seems to have sunk without trace (at least as far as recordings go) but No 2 (c1935) achieved a deal of success, especially its central movement, ‘Pavanne’ – cunningly misspelt to ensure American radio announcers pronounced it correctly – which was praised in these page for its ‘hotting up, so to speak, of the old four-in-a-bar dance measure … very attractively and discreetly’ (9/60). No 4, the still livelier Latin-American Symphonette (1940; Nos 1-3 were all subtitled American Symphonettes), ‘which belies its horrible title’ (8/66) is the largest and arguably most popular of the set, with its infectious rhythms and brilliantly calculated orchestration.

There are a number of competing recordings of these works, with David Alan Miller and the Albany Symphony Orchestra the main competition in Symphonettes Nos 2 and 3. Fagen and the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra are just as idiomatic as interpreters and are better served by Naxos’s bright recording. Of Gould’s own recordings only that of Spirituals (1941) is available currently, part of a six-disc RCA survey (5/16). Spirituals is another typical work, its five vivid movements described by its composer as ‘a work for string choir and orchestra’, designed ‘to realise the texture of this idiom’ and ‘the different feelings and characteristics of the folk expression’. Fagen and his Viennese players do it proud.