Ben Goldscheider, BBC National Orchestra Of Wales & Jaime Martin - Gavin Higgins: Horn Concerto & Fanfare, Air & Flourishes (2025) Hi-Res

Gavin Higgins has spoken evocatively - and perhaps romantically -about the music of the forest which surrounded him in his childhood: sounds of foxes and deer mingled with brass bands & church choir. Nature and music, he says, are powerfully linked in his mind.

Almost as soon as he could speak, Gavin was given a cornet to blow and grew up playing in the brass band conducted by his grandfather and populated by most of his family. A scholarship to specialist music school in Manchester and subsequent study at the Royal Northern College of Music meant that he moved on to the orchestral French horn.

Now, as a composer chiefly working in the orchestral & opera world, Gavin still writes for brass bands and has even put his two musical traditions on the stage together in an award winning Concerto Grosso for Brass Band and Orchestra. But the pieces on this disc which feature the French horn - Horn Concerto and Fanfare, Air and Flourish - mark the first time that he has highlighted his own instrument in the solo slot. As ever, it was a personal connection which sparked the idea of the Horn Concerto - an approach from Ben Goldscheider, made in the full knowledge that this would reunite Gavin with his younger self.