Under the direction of Professor Russel Mikkelson, The Ohio State University Wind Symphony is a nationally recognized ensemble devoted to the preparation and performance of the finest traditional and contemporary music for band. On this disc from Naxos’s popular Wind Band Classics series, they present a wide-ranging program with global connections, from the overture to Russian composer Kabalevsky’s opera about a Breton master carpenter, Colas Breugnon, to Aaron Copland’s El salón México which takes us ‘south of the border’. Contemporary American composers are represented by Donald Grantham, whose Southern Harmony draws on an 1835 collection of American songs, Morten Lauridsen’s sublimely still O Magnum Mysterium, and John Stevens’s colorfully-scored Symphony.