On track: Pretty as a soft-focus picture postcard

We have all been warned about talking to strangers, let alone asking them to send us their music.

ABC Classics didn't seem to worry when it put out a call on the internet for orchestral works "of great beauty".

Four hundred flooded in and a dozen made it on to the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra's new Soliloquy album, including a particularly unctuous specimen from the TSO's conductor Sean O'Boyle.

Perhaps I didn't heed the warning signs: the fact that the disc is on the ABC's Atmospheres label, an imprint devoted to "sublime ambient music"; or that soft-focus image of a "dinghy by sunset" on the CD cover.

And so I innocently settled down for the evening with 77 minutes of "enchanting soundscapes" that promised to "soothe the soul and delight the ear".

After two tracks, I was in a cold panic. I started to see credit titles scrolling down the wall in front of me. This is, I decided, the sort of music that one hears while trudging out of a cinema in search of daylight and silence.

Just who are these 12 composers, apart from Jennifer Higdon? With a respectable Concerto for Orchestra behind her and a Piano Concerto for Lang Lang in the works, she should have known better.

One is the splendidly named Nancy Bloomer Deussen, a veritable queen of "accessible contemporary" represented by 12 minutes of picture postcard music titled Carmel-by-the-Sea. Deussen's profuse website quotes praise from Walnut Creek's Diablo Symphony Orchestra.

It notes a glowing review from Carson Cooman, who is also on the TSO disc, a man who has achieved a terrifying total of more than 650 published and commissioned works.

Some of the composers remain tight-lipped about their influences, but then lame references to Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man do not lift Linda Worsley's Enchanted Castle above the commonplace.

With television advertising, Soliloquy could well find itself an undiscriminating audience for whom mist-filled horn solos are ample compensation for occasionally steely toned strings.

If you fancy some palatable slices of the pastoral in assorted pastel colours, search out Robin Milford's Fishing by Moonlight.

This lovely Hyperion disc still charms me as much as it did when I reviewed it two years ago. Its pastel is fade-proof.

* Soliloquy (ABC Classics 476 7929), Robin Milford, Fishing by Moonlight (Hyperion 67444)