Anthony Philip Heinrich, Syracuse Symphony Orchestra, Christopher Keene, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Anthony Paratore, Joseph Paratore

Here are two extremely entertaining concoctions by two nineteenth-century American Romantics who wrote music on a grand scale. After a broadly lyrical first movement in the grand tradition of his friend and mentor Hector Berlioz, Gottschalk introduces, appropriately enough, a Cuban rumba into the second and final movement of his breezy south-of-the-border excursion, Night in the Tropics. The sources of Heinrich's musical style are in Haydn and to some extent Beethoven, but with the ornateness of Italian opera and often a freer use of melodic and harmonic chromaticism. His rough-hewn Grand Symphony is effusively programmatic with odd harmonic twists.