Earlier in the year, I spent some time listening to two newer recordings with good South Florida connections, and I don’t know that they got a lot of attention at the time, so here’s my effort at redressing that.

The first was a Naxos disc called Reflections of wind band music by the American composers David Maslanka and Thomas Sleeper, played by Gary Green and the Frost Wind Ensemble at the University of Miami. UM professor Craig Morris is the soloist for Sleeper’s Trumpet Concerto.

Sleeper himself is perhaps the best-known classical composer in South Florida, and this piece perhaps shows the more conservative side of his art. It’s a brief, jaunty three-movement work of about 17 minutes with a brooding slow movement (subtitled ….the river Lethe) in which long melodies in the trumpet intertwine with the higher winds and especially the harp before building to a powerful climax.

The Maslanka Symphony No. 3, a major work in five movements, takes up the rest of the disc, and is notable for its deliberate pace and straightforward melodic writing; it’s somewhat reminiscent of the film-music tradition, but successfully evokes the big landscapes of the West where the composer now lives.

The recording was made in 2004, released in 2007, and now is getting another push: For every copy of the $8.99 CD bought at naxosdirect.com, Naxos will donate a dollar to the UM Frost School Scholarship Fund. At the very least, both pieces are honorable contributions to this country’s long and distinguished history of music written for wind ensemble.

The other recording, released this summer, features the fine Canadian violinist Lara St. John in the Four Seasons of Vivaldi paired with the Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, a compilation of separate pieces by the Argentine master of the tango, Astor Piazzolla.

The orchestra on the recording is the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, directed by Eduardo Marturet, director of the Miami Symphony Orchestra. This is really a fine, zestful recording of these works, with St. John playing with engagement, fire and sparkle throughout.

The orchestra of young Venezuelans sounds excellent, and there is a fresh quality to the Vivaldi that belies its status as one of the most performed, most recorded classical pieces of all time. The Piazzolla has a rough and ready energy that is infectious in spite of the weakness of some of the writing; this reading of the four pieces is beautifully realized and performed.

I’ll also add my voices to many of the critics who reviewed this disc in praising the exceptional production values St. John has brought to this recording, which is released on her own Ancalagon label. Not only is the sound exceptional, the program booklet is rich with lovely art, complete in four languages, and prints the sonnets that Vivaldi wrote to accompany his deathless concerti.

It’s a first-class effort all around, and it provides another good reason to check out Marturet’s work while following his current efforts this season at the helm of the Miami Symphony.