In fact, this entire release—and no doubt the summer concerts from which it derives—has an air of joyful music-making. That would be a wonderful sign that the National Symphony is waking up from its sleepiness. I couldn’t be more pleased for them.

The venue sounds well enough in what is clearly a well-engineered disc and the inimitable chord spacings that open Copland’s Billy the Kid Suite certainly convey that sense of ‘tall, wide and handsome’...But the open, rather too wellhomogenised (for my taste) sound picture contributes to a presentation of this music that, while slickly projected by the NSO and its music director Gianandrea Noseda, is somehow too urbane to be entirely in keeping with its frontier spirit, its homespun local colour.