Though it never quite scales the indelible melodic peaks of the Grand Canyon Suite, Ferde Grofe‘s 1926 Mississippi Suite (misspelt on the front of Naxos’s jewel-case) remains an endearing specimen none the less, with the second of its four movements (a cheeky portrait-in-sound of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn) perhaps the highlight. As for the main feature, William T. Stromberg directs in affectionate, bright-and-breezy fashion, and the Bournemouth orchestra responds with huge gusto. The sound, too, is spectacularly full-blooded, though the string timbre is not as breathtakingly natural as it is on Dorati’s 1982 Detroit SO version. If I also marginally miss the greater sense of atmosphere and textural refinement that Dorati generates in both ‘Sunrise’ and ‘Sunset’, Stromberg (best-known for his enterprising film-music recordings) really comes into his own in the more vividly pictorial pages of ‘On the Trail’ (delightfully done) and ‘Cloudburst’, imbuing Grofe‘s by turns enjoyably over-the-top and touchingly naive tone-painting with all the necessary widescreen grandeur.
Commissioned by the New York State Power Authority to celebrate the 1961 opening of the hydro-electric Robert Moses Power Plant (no, I am not making this up) , the Niagara Falls Suite serves up a pitifully thin (and at times unintentionally hilarious) brew, and the less said about it the better. Stromberg and company certainly deliver the goods, albeit in a completely lost cause. Still a bargain overall, though.'