Growing up in the Forest of Dean, these woodlands were Gavin Higgins’ stamping ground and they remain an inspiration. He wrote A Forest Symphony in 2009 and now his horn concerto, written for Ben Goldscheider and premiered by him together with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, is conceived as a paean – root and branch – to the miraculous oxygen-giving microcosms that are trees. Higgins realises an appropriately life-enhancing energy, embracing Goldscheider’s virtuosity and, in often highly descriptive language – far from avant-garde – the sense of an organic living forest, reflected in the arboresque titles of the three movements, Understorey, Overstorey and lastly, by way of connecting the whole, Mycelium Rondo.
At the very opening of the concerto is a dark low growl in Wagner’s key of E flat from which the solo horn gradually emerges. Higgins makes no bones about referencing the prelude to Das Rheingold, evoking the power of the natural world, nor the deliberate nods to the concertos of Mozart and Richard Strauss, while his brass-writing with its echoes of the hunting horn and lyrical flourishes is inevitably redolent of Britten. Yet it is Higgins’ own sure sense of orchestral colour and fluency of expression that commands attention.
The solo horn engages with the quartet of orchestral horns throughout, in solidarity and playfully, too, while the clarity of the percussion discourse – notably the wooden instruments, by way of underlining the overall theme – was also carefully calibrated. There were moments when a crazed woodpecker seemed to be hammering its point.
Two piccolos high in the air begin the slow movement, Goldscheider’s solo line then carrying a hauntingly beautiful feel, with string phrases falling like leaves. The finale had an almost celebratory feel, but Higgins’s understanding that the dire ecological threat to a personal paradise is replicated across the globe, meant that the music also sounded a note of mourning. In his tenure as composer-in-association of the BBC NOW, a happy and productive relationship, Higgins’s scores for them have already made their mark. This concerto is a further success.
Conductor Jaime Martín demonstrated his affinity for Brahms in a performance of the Second Symphony that exuded warmth, grace and muscularity, the BBCNOW horn section shining again. Martín brought the same sensibilities to Parry’s Elegy for Brahms, resolutely faithful to that composer’s style and memory, and with Charles Villiers Stanford – who completed the unfinished tribute, first heard as an elegy to Parry himself – faithful to both.
• Broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 30 January. Goldscheider performs the work at Cadogan Hall, London (with the London Chamber Orchestra), on 7 February; and in Eindhoven, Maastricht and Aachen (with Philharmonie Zuidnederland) on 1, 2 and 3 March
