On track: Sure to shake up the martini olives

It is not every composer who claims the Bugs Bunny Show as a formative musical influence. Graeme Koehne does and there are a few frolics in the carrot patch on a new Naxos release featuring the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in four of his works.

The Australian composer's shtick is to whisk lounge and TV theme music of the 50s and 60s off on a rip-roaring symphonic trip. It sounds a good idea but, somewhere along the way, we lose the lusty vulgarity of Les Baxter, the whiz-bang camp of Esquivel and the chop-and-go of Carl Stalling's original cartoon scores.

This 58-minute sonic spectacular can be wearying. To some, Koehne's Elevator Music could be likened to being trapped in a lift listening to eight minutes of rejected dances from West Side Story.

Oboeist Diana Doherty, who played in Auckland a few years back and returns next month with the NZSO, is irresistible. With shapely phrasing, she draws out melody after melody in Koehne's Inflight Entertainment, a "concerto" which runs the gamut from TV thriller themes (Agent Provocateur) to minimalism (Beat Girl).

If the Sydney Symphony, under Takuo Yuasa, could well have the olives somersaulting in your martini glass, then our own NZSO is every bit as invigorating when Yuasa takes them through a programme of music by Yasushi Akutagawa.

You will be in heaven as Akutagawa piles colour upon colour in his saturated orchestral canvases. His 1971 Rapsodia staggers the senses, from opening horn whoops to final gargantuan roar, recorded with such attention to detail that you can even pick up the occasional shuffle of the players.

Akutagawa is at his most adventurous in his 1958 Ellora Symphony. Inspired by the erotic visions of pagan India, its 20 fragmented movements inspire some superlative playing from the NZSO, and Yuasa's tonal balancing never wavers.

Here was a composer who made a name for himself in the USSR and China at a time when both countries were satisfied with home-grown culture. The Naxos CD ends with Akutagawa's rather jolly Trinita Sinfonica of 1948, trite, tuneful but heartless stuff and obviously just the thing to get Stalinist toes tapping and make Mao beam beatifically from the circle.

* Graeme Koehne, Inflight Entertainment (Naxos 8.555847)

Yasushi Akutagawa, Orchestral Works (Naxos 8.555975)