Hot on the heels of Koch's superb Rozsa concert (9/93) comes this equally successful and very welcome disc of orchestral music by Jerome Moross (1913–83). Moross is chiefly remembered for the exquisitely languorous ballad ''Lazy Afternoon'' (from the 1954 Broadway musical The Golden Apple) and his expansive, vibrant score for the wide-screen Western The Big Country (1958). His music for the concert-hall possesses the same folksy simplicity and propulsive, athletic rhythms as his film music and is further defined by its youthful vitality; even later works like the Variations and Sonata in G of 1975 (Bay Cities 10/90) are blessed with bracing and highly contrapuntal scoring that is always engaging without ever sounding naive.
Although written during the war, the 20-minute Symphony is unreservedly optimistic and displays Moross's dynamic characteristics in all four succinct, contrasting movements, They are most pronounced, however, in the first where the composer eschews sonata form to present a series of rugged variations on a sturdy theme, evoking potent sepia images of the rolling plains and the dusty mid-West towns of 1930s America in a style quite unlike that of the much-imitated Copland. Sonata form is reserved instead for the cool, crisp Prokofievian second movement which unexpectedly introduces a concertante piano solo (a section that may have originally been conceived as a separate work according to Christopher Palmer's customary intelligent notes). It is a pity that the ballet The Last Judgement (1953), which recounts the temptation in the Garden of Eden from Eve's (then staunchly feminist) point of view, was never produced as Moross's melodic and inventive score bubbles with energizing movement and highlights the bold choreographic streak found in so much of his work outside the cinema. The piece flirts delightfully with a jazz idiom and, not surprisingly, the Evil One gets the best tune, a seductively sly theme for trombone (later felicitously embellished with a Latin-flavoured combination of xylophone, vibraphone and harp). The Variations on a Waltz also has a balletic connection. As ''Ridinghood Revisited'', the piece was to have been the fourth part of Ballet Ballads (three short song-and-dance entertainments written in collaboration with John Latouche between 1940 and 1948), but was reworked into its present form in 1966. However, as with The Last Judgement, the composer's nimble score can be enjoyed without knowledge of the ballet's original scenario, though as Palmer suggests, the music's lilting lustiness is indeed enhanced on learning that the wolf was conceived as a slightly aging, but ever voracious Viennese rake!
JoAnn Falletta and the LSO prove to be worthy champions of Moross's music and it is hard to imagine performances more warmly enthusiastic or as thoroughly idiomatic. They respond to the composer's inherent exuberance with remarkable verve and faultless precision; their persuasive playing captured in an excellent, full-blooded recording. Here is music that will not fail to delight; as the composer once observed, ''Down with Obscurantism!'''