The BBC Concert Orchestra, Keith Lockhart - Frederick Converse: American Sketches (2011)

The American composer Frederick Shepherd Converse was a leading name in American music up to the Second World War. It was Converse who composed the first American opera, performed at the Met in New York. Yet despite being widely heard in his day, after his death in 1940 he was soon eclipsed by the new generation of Copland, Harris, Barber and their contemporaries. His revival is long overdue, vividly demonstrated by this programme of colourful orchestral tone poems – the four movements of American Sketches from the late 1920s, the early Festival of Pan (after a Keats poem) and the evocative Song of the Sea, a tone poem after Whitman. Whether you respond to the lyricism of the Festival of Pan and Song of the Sea or the varied scenes of American Sketches, this is enjoyable music to which you will return time and again.