Is Schumann’s Koncertstück for four horns the most life-affirming work in the repertoire? Perhaps not. But as you’re listening to this new recording, you’re convinced that it is. In fact, all four of these works soar with an uncommon degree of joie de vivre.

I don’t mean to suggest that Martin Owen and his all-star colleagues are either Pollyannas or hard-sell proselytisers: there’s nothing either saccharine or hyped up about the playing. Nor do the performers slight the music’s shadows. The tinges of regret in the middle movement of the Schumann come across hauntingly; and the mournfulness that opens Weber’s Concertino and, most importantly, the bittersweet nostalgia that tints the first two movements of Strauss’s autumnal Second Concerto are coaxed out by Owen’s sweet tone, his control of colour (note how subtly he shades his timbre to match Strauss’s harmonic changes) and his artful (but never arch) phrasing.

Still, for all their wide range, the interpretations are generally upbeat, light in touch and quick in tempo. They’re confident, too, without a touch of strain in even the most treacherous passages, like Schumann’s high-flying finale, taken at a bracing clip. The camaraderie among the four soloists in the Schumann – and between Owen and the orchestra throughout – only adds to the uplift. I wouldn’t want to be without the raucous buzz of the horns in John Eliot Gardiner’s period-instrument recording of the Schumann, less radiant and more heroic (Archiv, 6/98). Nor, of course, would I want to give up the classic pairing of the Strauss concertos by Dennis Brain (11/57). But especially given John Wilson’s refined conducting, the orchestra’s finely detailed playing and Chandos’s typically warm engineering, this is a recording of distinction.