Another Naxos rediscovery among North American romantics. Henry Kimball Hadley (1871­1937) grew up in the New England area around Boston‚ with his father and brother professional musicians‚ and became a pupil of Chadwick‚ later studying in Vienna and Munich. Apart from being an immensely prolific composer‚ he developed a highly successful conducting career in Germany and in the USA and generously used his position to promote American music. In 1930 John Tasker Howard rated him as ‘one of the most prominent of our native composers’ and summed up his music as ‘playable and so agreeable that people like to hear it. And that is a great deal in these days.’ Over 70 years later‚ accessibility is even better for business and‚ if Hadley sounds like film music‚ he did after all write what may have been the first synchronised film score in 1926. Hadley’s Fourth Symphony (1911)‚ one of five‚ has a detailed programme with the composer as tourist. The frozen North is frigid enough; the South is delightful with its ragtime context; and the West Coast epic finale has an Elgarian swagger. Hadley simply spoke the language of the German late­Romantics and went on doing so into the 1920s‚ where The Ocean‚ his sumptuous tone­poem with an ecstatic Straussian climax‚ is the latest piece here. It’s all expertly scored and as energetically confident as the rapidly evolving USA of the period‚ but predictable. Williams and the Ukrainian players really make the most of these first recordings and there’s an informative CD booklet: it all lifts Hadley deservedly from history into sound at a stroke.