You’d expect Gavin Higgins and Ben Goldscheider to strike special sparks off each other – a horn-player-composer steeped in brass band traditions and a young performer noted not just for virtuosity but for adventurous repertoire. The three substantial movements of Higgins’s Horn Concerto, playing for virtually 30 minutes, are not only ambitious in design but an exemplary demonstration of the composer’s ability to find fresh and compelling ways of working with archetypes familiar from the mainstream classical and romantic traditions, so while any short segment of the material might seem to echo or resemble the music of many other compositions from many other eras, the cumulative impact is novel and distinctive. The titles of the movements – ‘Understorey’, ‘Overstorey’, ‘Mycelium Rondo’ – are patently novel, and the extensive and lucid notes in the booklet by Gillian Moore confirm that the world this music inhabits is one of elemental places and things, from forests to fungi, rather than of people. But listening humanity should still find the result absorbing rather than alienating.

The short trilogy of Fanfare, Air and Flourishes, written two years earlier, is a hymn of praise to the sonic attributes of an instrument given more thorough inspection in the concerto and that also plays a role (as Moore explains) in The Faerie Bride. However, anyone tempted to set this 2021 Three Choirs Festival commission aside unheard as promising a pallidly pious Victorian cantata is in for a shock. Just as the Horn Concerto responds to nature as raw yet magical, so The Faerie Bride exposes the poignant tragedy inherent in human incompatibilities and the rituals that shape human relationships. Set to a libretto by Francesca Simon that is a model of economical expressiveness, this BBC recording of the first performance has the kind of nervous intensity that such occasions can generate, so that even occasional details in the performance which might have been smoothed over by editing appear (rightly if this is the case) to have been left in their original state.

Instead of an earnestly universalised version of the legend in which men at sea encounter the uncanny song of the sirens, the folk tale devised by Higgins and Simon centres on an acute sense of locality – Wales – to best project the profound cultural and psychological implications of the universal need for community, and the catastrophic consequences of its absence. Marta Fontanals-Simmons and Roderick Williams expertly convey the joy-turning-to-anguish of the couple, human and ‘other’ within the local community as that community projects increasing hostility across the ritual sequence of the four seasons. In these terms, perhaps the real tragedy enacted in The Faerie Bride is that, in the end, the man still cannot accompany his wife into the other world which is her destiny, her nature. Yet her departure is no ecstatic love-death but an uncompromising acceptance of her otherness; and it is left to the sorrowing human survivor to confess, helplessly, that ‘the lake took back all I love’. The inevitable, painful confrontation between personal and communal, local and universal, has been given many memorable musical realisations, often on a very large scale. But with its structural terseness and psychological candour, The Faerie Bride is a fine example of contemporary classical music, which makes this splendid recording something to savour.