Gavin Higgins’s 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.

The Horn Concerto connects to the past in other ways. It’s written in E flat, the key of famous Horn Concertos by Mozart and Strauss. It also amplifies and expands the sound of the solo horn by giving it a prominent relationship with the quartet of horns in the orchestra, calling to mind Robert Schumann’s blazing Konzertstuck from the middle of the 19th century and Gyorgy Ligeti’s Hamburg Concerto, written at the turn of the 21st.

Fanfare, Air and Flourishes is a suite for solo horn made from three pieces written between 2020 and 2021. The first, ‘Fanfare’, was written to a commission from the Royal Academy of Music, who invited two hundred composers to write pieces for all of the instruments taught at the Academy in celebration of the 200th anniversary of the institution. ‘Fanfare’ leans into one particular aspect of the horn’s personality: it's assertive, loud and urgent. The expression mark at the start is ‘bold and brassy’. ‘Air’ celebrates the horn’s mellow tone; semplice espressivo is the instruction at the start of the piece and the horn plays a melody as expressive as anything you’d hear as a solo in a brass band. ‘Flourish’, the third piece, was a commission from BBC Radio 3. Rising melodies – or flourishes – run up and down the horn, returning even more elaborately after a simpler middle section. Flourish was written at the same time as Gavin was writing The Faerie Bride, and these flourishes appear in the oratorio to mark the turn of the seasons.

If Gavin Higgins’s reunion with the French horn in his Horn Concerto is all unalloyed joy, The Faerie Bride provides something darker. Gavin looks westward from the Forest of Dean to a Welsh tale from the Red Book of Hergest, an important mediaeval manuscript of Welsh history, poetry and stories. The legend of The Lady of the Lake tells of a water spirit who emerges from Llyn y Fan Fach in the Brecon Beacons and marries an earthly man, having insisted on a clear prenup agreement: if he strikes her three times (she uses the curious and ambiguous phrase ‘heart’s blow’ which suggests mental rather than physical cruelty) she will go back into the lake and take everything she has brought to the marriage with her. Tales of watery spirits who take human form to lure men to doom are abundant in European culture; kelpies, selkies, mermaids, sirens, Rhinemaidens but, says Gavin, ‘The Welsh myths are empowering, with strong female characters who set their own agenda. There is no coercion, theft, or kidnap but rather misunderstandings and cultural differences.’

In telling the tale of The Faerie Bride, Gavin reunited with the writer Francesa Simon with whom he’d collaborated on the highly successful opera The Monstrous Child. Composer and librettist have created an oratorio for orchestra plus baritone, who plays The Man, mezzo-soprano who plays The Woman and a small chorus who represent a bigoted mob who see only bad in this stranger in their midst.