ROCKY MOUNTAIN HIGH

With its picture-postcard cover and mood-music title, I braced myself for a soapy waterfall of muzak. It only took a bar or two to remind me you can't always judge a CD by its cover.

This is really an orchestral suite - a tone poem in 22 parts - of a serious young composer's impressions of the Rockies. Mostly soft and lyrical, it also socks it to you now and again with sweeping evocations of the mountains' awe and majesty.

Haun, who lives in Boulder, Colorado, and has hiked in their Rockies since childhood, helped score the TV coverage of several Olympic Games. He does an Olympian-scale job on this CD, leading 28 musicians - including members of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra - in an engaging and genuinely moving work of light new-classical music. With headphones, you can also have a 3-D experience as birds, bucks, wind, water, and other brief nature soundscapes fill the gaps between the musical tracks. But it's really the music that makes this postcard a sight for sore ears.