Howard Hanson, the masterful conductor who championed American music, was also a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, an accomplished pianist and pedagogue who directed the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York for forty years. Today, Hanson is best known for his vividly orchestrated seven symphonies. Completed in 1922, during Hanson’s time in Rome, Symphony No. I, with its powerfully evocative style, displays the influence of his teacher, Ottorino Respighi.