Before Ives, Chadwick, Amy Beach and John Knowles Paine, there were William Henry Fry, of Santa Claus Symphony fame, and his protégé, George Frederick Bristow. Whether or not Fry was the first American to compose a symphony, he did so before Gottschalk, who is sometimes credited as such. Fry produced seven works called symphonies in the 1850s, of which the Niagara (1854) is the fifth. Curiously, Bristow also composed a Niagara Symphony (also his fifth), a long-forgotten choral-and-orchestral work modelled (according to annotator Kyle Gann) on Beethoven’s Ninth, rather than Fry’s fiercely virtuoso tone poem.

Gann may well be correct in hailing Niagara as ‘one of the most avant-garde works of the 19th century’, with its battery of 11 timpani (each tuned to a separate pitch – only F is missing) and snare drums, with massed bass brass deployed to depict the roar and hiss of the great waterfall. Liszt is the model here, though the timpani chords will remind many of Berlioz, composers Fry encountered on his journalistic travels in Europe. Fry’s naturalistic sound world would not be heard so uncompromisingly until Jón Leifs’s tone poems of the 1950s and ’60s. Niagara must sound visceral in impact heard live; listening on headphones will get one close. Botstein’s gripping account with The Orchestra Now is taut and compelling, far more so than Tony Rowe’s polite-by-comparison version in Scotland.

Like Fry, Bristow – a professional violinist – espoused the cause of American music, even resigning his post with the New York Philharmonic in protest at their playing so little of it. Ironically, though, even more than with Fry, Bristow’s compositional models were resolutely European. The Arcadian Symphony (1872), partly assembled from his cantata The Pioneer, is a case in point. German romanticism rules its four movements’ inner workings, with several touches of Berlioz, again, in the scoring. It is a pleasant if prolix work, nicely performed here for the first time complete (a previous outing was crudely cut). The one embarrassment is the Scherzo, a lame and tame evocation of an ‘Indian War Dance and Attack by Indians’, very much of its time.