Chosen in 1988 as Composer of the Year by Musical America and now recognized as one of the finest song composers in America, Ned Rorem has also written a significant body of music for orchestra, including Three Symphonies (Naxos 8.559149). Written in a refined tonal idiom like so much of Rorem’s music, the 1985 Violin Concerto is notable for its elegiac lyrical invention. The recent Flute Concerto, the first in a series of Philadelphia Orchestra commissions for its principals, was described at its première as ‘not so much a concerto as a surpassingly imaginative fantasy for flute and orchestra’. It is performed on this world première recording by its dedicatee, Jeffrey Khaner.