Orpheus Chamber Orchestra - Copland: Appalachian Spring, Quiet City, Short Symphony (1989)

This is a beautiful album, rather intimate in character, dedicated to some of Aaron Copland's outstanding works (1900-1990). It also contains one of the great successes of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, which was ubiquitous in the 1980s and 1990s on the Deutsche Grammophon label.
Here, the straightforward style of the New York ensemble, with a slightly dry character, very clear in its timbres and attacks, makes it possible to underline Stravinsky's influences on the American, and also to reveal the craftsmanship of the younger composer's orchestral combinations.

Apart from the much-recorded 1945 version of Appalachian Spring and the sublime Quiet City, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra offers two other, rather rarer scores, Three Latin American Sketches, a triptych composed mainly in 1959, and also the Short Symphony (1933), performed in a version for chamber orchestra by Dennis Russell Davies - the Short Symphony was later transformed into a sextet by Copland in 1937. This is great music, little-played, which is richly deserving rediscovery.