I will admit, somewhat defiantly, that I sometimes consciously operate on prejudice, especially with regard to the arts, and more especially with regard to music. It's generally not pure prejudice; I usually have at least some reason for supposing that my opinion of this can reasonably, or at least not unreasonably, be extended to that, which resembles it, or seems to be of the same species. One of these prejudices is against recordings of classical music which have words like "gala" or "festival" in the title. If the cover includes a picture of fireworks, it's worse. If the title includes an exclamation mark, it's much worse.

The germ of justification for this prejudice is that I think such recordings are likely to be fluff--a collection of brief and showy works of superficial appeal but small substance, yoked together for precisely those reasons. Or perhaps the pieces are more worthwhile than that, but are mere pieces in the other sense, appealing parts of significant works pulled out of their context and yoked to others similarly extracted.

(This is what I think about collections of opera arias, especially. On the one hand, I'm not an especially avid listener of opera, and it's true that certain arias are the tastiest parts of a work which might not be of the greatest interest without them. So as a matter of taste I'm not really averse to the practice. It's a bit like making a best-of album from the work of a group which has a relatively small amount of material that you really like. On the other hand, I feel some sense of duty to the composer to at least give him the opportunity to show me the aria in its dramatic context.)

And I think that broad prejudice is at the root of a more specific prejudice, which I realize I've had for a long time without noticing it, against the popular works of Ottorino Respighi. I believe, though I don't have any specific instance, that I've seen his name on recordings of that sort. Or perhaps not--perhaps it's only that one of his frequently played and recorded works is "Festivals of Rome." Now that I think about it, I notice that I also have a mild prejudice against program music, music intended to depict some scene or event, even though Smetana's "The Moldau" is such a piece and was one of the first works of classical music that really excited me. (Another was Schonberg's "Pierrot Lunaire." That pairing says a lot about my musical taste.) Program music tends either not to work at all--i.e. the thing depicted would probably never have occurred to you if you hadn't been told--or to work too well, seeming contrived and gimmicky.

Prejudice is not necessarily a bad thing. Most people are prejudiced against snakes, because a few species are deadly. I am prejudiced against Great Danes, and strongly prejudiced against two Great Danes together, having been quietly but seriously threatened by a pair of them. And knowing of a case where a pair of them killed a foolish harmless little dog that crawled under a fence into their yard to say hello.

But one ought not to take prejudice so far as, for instance, to kill on sight any snake which happens to cross one's path. And most prejudices should remain open to exceptions and even the possibility of abandonment. 

I was not thinking of any of that a few weeks ago when I was looking for a relatively short, relatively light piece of music to listen to late one night, and "Pines of Rome" caught my eye. I think I noticed it because it happens to be the first piece in that collection of 104 MP3 tracks of Eugene Ormandy's conducting, "The Original Jacket Collection," which was offered on Amazon some years ago for the absurdly low price of $9.99. But it only took one hearing to dispel my prejudice and win me over completely.

"Pines of Rome" is a delightful work. Yes, it is fairly light, but it isn't cotton candy. Nor does it have that sort of stiffness or heaviness that I sometimes feel in the work of German composers when they try to be light. It's fresh and vivid, and leaves no sense that the composer wants it to be either more or less than it is, like a woman who doesn't seem to be making an effort to be charming but who simply is charming--and whether the latter is the product of greater artifice, who knows? (I said "a woman," because the word "charming" doesn't generally occur to me in relation to men. But of course it does to women.) At any rate, this is a charming work, and I've enjoyed it several times since that first hearing, more each time. Not everything has to be profound, complex, and intense. There's a place for straightforward, not-overly-demanding music that simply gives pleasure.

The program is really quite elaborate, as this explication at Wikipedia shows. I can't imagine most of that occurring to a listener, even one who knows the places depicted in the four sections: pines of the Villa Borghese, the catacombs, the Janiculum, and the Appian Way. I've never seen them and in fact was not even sure what the first and third were until I looked them up. Still, in a broad way the titles are suggestive and not intrusive. If the first one put any image at all into my mind, it was of a clear day with a fresh breeze. The second suggests no picture, just a somber atmosphere. The third is peaceful and, if you didn't envision some natural scene, the song of the nightingale would make it clear that you were meant to. The fourth title is maybe the most successful as a directive to the listener. The music is meant to depict not just the ancient road itself but the passage of ancient Roman legions upon it, and it's certainly martial enough.

I'm looking forward to hearing the other two works in this set, "Fountains of Rome" and "Festivals of Rome," though this one seems to be the most popular. 

This is the original jacket. It does not appeal to me. It stirs that prejudice I mentioned. It looks a little festive and includes the word "festivals."