Conjuring visions of America’s wide-open prairies and capturing the optimistic mood of its 19th-century settlers, Aaron Copland’s music remains fresh and distinctive. In this 2006 release, JoAnn Falletta and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra perform some of the composer’s less frequently encountered works that show his reaching out and tapping into the populist current. Letter from Home (1944) describes troops receiving mail from the old country while Prairie Journal evokes the West in a musical language that makes an immediate connection. Copland’s ballet Rodeo, premiered in 1942, is performed here with great energy, while The Red Pony, derived from the music Copland wrote for the John Steinbeck movie of the same name, somehow carries with it a sense of warm familiarity.