At our local library's used book sale I purchased, inter alia, a sealed
CD said to contain Christopher Rouse's Symphony No.  1 and another work of
his called Phantasmata, all performed by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra
w/ David Zinman conducting (Elektra Nonesuch 9 79230-2).  The CD itself
indicated it bore the same contents.  It and the package, listed four
tracks, one for the Symphony, w/ a timing of 26:58 and three for the
Phantasmata, w/ a total running time of 19:30.

I'd never heard the works before, but I've seen Rouse discussed on some of
the Internet lists I read and I figured I could afford to risk the three
bucks they were asking for the disc in the interest of making a possible
discovery.

The CD display indicated one track only, and what I heard was a seamless,
highly repetitive work sounding to this unsophisticated ear like an
annoying cross between New Age and minimalism, that seemed never to end
and indeed, checking the playing time, I found that, rather than a total
of 46:28, the darn thing had played for over 78 minutes!

I realize that readers here won't be able to identify the pig I purchased
in the poke unless the descriptions on disk and package were wrong, and the
two works are indeed quite similar sounding and running to a total playing
time almost half again as long as indicated.

But if the recorded works' identification, rather than their description
was in error, what do Rouse's Symphony No.  1 and his Phantasmata sound
like?

I'm now listening to a CD of Ole Schmidt's *Jeanne d'Arc* w/ the composer
conducting the Aalborg Symphony Orchestra (all of a sudden I feel like a
shot of Akvavit!) w/ Nina Pavlovski doing an enchanting vocalise and Erling
Moldrup playing guitar (dacapo 8.224112) that I'd purchased at the same
sale.  It was composed for Dreyer's silent film *The Passion of Joan of
Arc* (1927) and has been condensed from its contemplated running time of
82 minutes to 58:28 and, from what I'm hearing, I'd like to hear the full
version.

Walter Meyer