Both Alan Hovhaness and Aaron Copland were American composers – Hovhaness of Armenian-Scottish descent; Copland of Russian extraction – but their symphonies in this collection were first performed in England and in Mexico respectively, before Stokowski brought them to the USA. Darius Milhaud’s First Symphony was written for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and proved to be the means by which he and his family were able to flee the Nazi invasion of their native France in 1940. The youngest (and most recent) composer represented here, José Serebrier, has since become one of the most recorded and most-admired of conductors but he began his career in his native Uruguay as a composer and violinist. Following his family’s moving to the United States, it was in his adopted country that, as Serebrier relates, Stokowski perceived the qualities in the youth’s First Symphony, written when he was 16, and was sufficiently impressed by the assurance of the music that he conducted the world premiere in Houston in 1957, the composer being 18 years old.