Roderick Williams, Marta Fontanals-Simmons, BBC National Orchestra Of Wales & Martyn Brabbins - Gavin Higgins: The Faerie Bride (2025)

Gavin Higgins’ music is bursting with authenticity. Everything he writes speaks in some way of where he comes from, of the land, of the community, of the family which formed him. He grew up in a working class former mining community in the Forest of Dean, a borderland between England and Wales with its own dialect, a liminal place where Welsh songs and stories as well as English are in the air. It’s a place where brass band music is the chief legacy of the coal mines, the last of which closed a decade before Gavin was born and where the forest, with its sounds, its colours and its stories was a constant presence. Gavin has spoken evocatively - and perhaps romantically - about the music of the forest which surrounded him: sounds of foxes and deer mingled with brass bands, church choirs and occasional illegal raves. 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 and 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 the horn virtuoso Ben Goldscheider, made in the full knowledge that this would reunite Gavin with his younger self.