Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s Endless Parade is one of the more substantial celebrations of trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger’s virtuosity. Hardenberger’s own 1990 recording of the work (originally on Collins Classics, reissued on Decca, 6/91^R) now has a worthy successor in a reading which gets behind the work’s carnivalesque aspects to explore its more sinister (anti)militaristic overtones. Philippe Schartz, supported to the hilt by Jac van Steen and the BBC NOW, with Chris Stock on vibraphone, downplays neither the edgy discontinuities nor the textural subtleties: and Birtwistle’s music gives him the kind of challenging substance that is distinctly lacking in the remainder of the programme.

Best runner-up to Endless Parade is the Arutiunian Concerto: this has plenty of rhythmic clichés and a stop-go form-scheme but enough energy and folksy tunefulness – all admirably conveyed in this performance – to justify its existence. Christian Jost’s Pietà is more elaborate but suffers from a distinctly cheesy ambition to place a tribute to the jazz trumpeter Chet Baker in the context of the Virgin Mary’s emblematic sorrow at the Crucifixion. The music drifts in a rather nebulous manner, its soupy jazziness merely off-colour, given the other underlying theme. Even so, it provides more substance than Kurt Roger’s Concerto grosso No 1, a slice of 1930s neo-classicism which offers the soloist little opportunity to shine and the listener little of anything to engage with. The recordings in themselves are well crafted, not least in finding a workable balance for the bright-toned soloist and the inevitably subordinate orchestra.