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.
