Ben Goldscheider was a finalist in the 2016 BBC Young Musician, and if the biography in the booklet of this disc is anything to go by, he hasn’t looked back since, making his debut at the Berlin Philharmonie and appearing as soloist with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Aurora Orchestra, among others. So this disc is effectively a calling card for a young artist who already has a fairly clear idea where he’s going.

That’s certainly the impression it leaves. It takes considerable chops, after all, to open and close a recital with a pair of substantial unaccompanied contemporary works, and both Jörg Widmann’s Air (2005) and Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Concert Étude (2000) are unsparing in their technical demands. Goldscheider seems to relish the challenge, making atmospheric, highly characterful poetry out of their echo effects, natural harmonics and rapid-fire switches of dynamics and playing techniques. The recorded sound (the venue is the Turner Sims Concert Hall in Southampton) gives the music ample room to breathe and captures the music’s quietest whisper.

The sound doesn’t feel quite as comfortable in the items with piano – the horn, in the foreground, is sometimes fuzzy while the piano, further back, is slightly brittle – and nor, initially, does Goldscheider’s playing in either a modest, Hummel-like sonata by Nikolaus von Krufft or Schumann’s more familiar Adagio and Allegro. The technique’s there; these pieces just feel under-characterised, though the pianist Daniel Hill does some lovely things with the Chopinesque embroidery of Krufft’s slow movement. Things reignite with the sunset romanticism of the York Bowen Sonata and Kirchner’s gloomy, gothic Tre Poemi: performances of considerable personality and flair from a horn player who must surely have thrilling prospects ahead of him.