Vivid detail & white-hot performances: Gavin Higgins’ Horn Concerto & The Faerie Bride now on disc

Gavin Higgins: Horn Concerto, Fanfare, Air and Flourishes, The Faerie Bride; Ben Goldscheider, Marta Fontanals-Simmons, Roderick Williams, Three Choirs Festival Chorus, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Jaime Martin, Martyn Brabbins; Lyrita
Reviewed 25 February 2025

Two of Gavin Higgins most substantial recent works in outstanding performances that reveal the wealth of vivid detail in the writing, with horn player Ben Goldscheider on white-hot form and strong performances from Marta Fontanals-Simmons, Roderick Williams

Composer Gavin Higgins has been having a busy time of it in the last few years, producing a clutch of impressive, large-scale works and now a new disc from Lyrita gives us a chance to catch two of them. Higgins’ Horn Concerto was premiered in 2024 by horn player Ben Goldscheider, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, conductor Jaime Martin [we caught the work’s London premiere with a different orchestra, see my review] and the same forces went into the studio to record the work. BBCNOW was joined by conductor Martyn Brabbins, baritone Roderick Williams, mezzo-soprano Marta Fontanals-Simmons and the Three Choirs Festival Chorus for Higgins’ The Faerie Bride at the 2023 Three Choirs Festival [see my review] and we have a live recording of that performance on the disc. Linking the two are three movements for solo horn, Fanfare, Air and Flourishes.

Higgins’ Horn Concerto, written for Ben Goldscheider, takes its inspiration from the forest with three movements, Understory evoking the forest floor, Overstorey taking us to the forest canopy, and Mycelium Rondo which makes a nod to the fungal network that connects the trees. Higgins, who was born into a brass banding family and who also played the horn, reflects the horn’s musical traditions with hunting horns and fanfares, and the use of an ensemble of orchestral horns that evokes Schumann’s Konzertstuck.

The opening of the first movement, however, takes us deep, deep into the Rhine with an evocation of Wagner’s Rheingold, and the solo horn emerges from this orchestral undulation. Higgins’ orchestral writing is very detailed, we get a sense of the roiling surface with lots of textures underneath, a rich tapestry that is complex yet comprehensible. Goldscheider’s solo is part of this, floating over or embedded but finally he gets a wonderful solo moment over gentle atmospherics with horn calls to the fore. As the music becomes more mobile, with the orchestra pushing forward, the solo part is busy indeed ensuring the movement ends with drama.

The second movement takes us high into the tree tops with quiet and eerie high textures, finally the lower instruments join but at a different pace. This movement delights in presenting multiple layers, each moving at a different tempo, giving a real feel of space, and over which Goldscheider’s horn spins a rhapsodic solo line. Finally things wind down and the horn comes to the fore again over just fragments and wisps of orchestra.

The finale is a definite nod to the rondos of Mozart’s concertos, but here Higgins gives us very modern pulse and rhythm, the excitement echoed by Goldscheider’s vivid horn playing. The vigour and energy lead us to some wonderfully detailed counterpoint, and the climax is powerful indeed, featuring tireless playing from Ben Goldscheider.

The work benefits, I think from seeing it performed so that we can easily follow the solo part. This is a big solo part, with lots to do and plenty of notes per square inch. Goldscheider plays tirelessly and gives no hint of the taxing nature of the part, a tour de force indeed. The orchestra sound is terrific and we really get a feel for Higgins’ orchestral detail.

Fanfare, Air and Flourishes is a suite for solo horn that Higgins created from three pieces written during lockdown. The Fanfare leans into the fanfare moments in the concerto whilst Flourishes was written at the same time as The Faerie Bride and has material in common. Fanfare is all vivid energy with Goldscheider and Higgins creating a sense of the horn in dialogue with itself. Air is all lyric melancholy  whilst Flourishes continues this mood but gathers momentum, becoming more intense.

Gavin Higgins: The Faerie Bride Marta Fontanals-Simmons, Roderick Williams, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Martyn Brabbins The Three Choirs Festival 2023 (Photo: Dale Hodgetts)

Born in the Forest of Dean, Higgins looks Westward for the tale at the centre of The Faerie Bride. Taken from the Red Book of Hergest, the legend of The Lady of the Lake tells the tale of a water spirit who marries an earthly man. He violates their agreement by striking three blows, in fact he denies her nature three times, mental rather than physical cruelty, and she returns to the lake. The piece explores ideas of the lake as liminal space as well as the familiar Celtic trope of the disadvantage of a mortal having a relationship with a fairy.

The librettist is Francesca Simon who wrote the libretto for Higgins’ opera The Monstrous Child. Here Simon gives us an elegantly structured, spare text whose repetitions help to give Higgins’ structure, yet within this he finds enormous variety. The Man, Roderick Williams, is very much the narrator and though there are dialogues with the Woman, Marta Fontanals-Simmons, much of her role is taken up with a sequence of Welsh folksongs, with Higgins using the Welsh text and melody to evoke the Woman’s otherness. After a prologue, the basics of the plot are set out in The Lake, and then there are movements devoted to Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. The first simply establishes things, with a chorus of villagers that reoccurs, the Woman is not popular. The following three seasons take place at a birth, a marriage and a death, when the Woman’s reaction is the opposite of what is expected and the Man complains, striking one of the blows.

The music begins deep in the depths again, as the music rises from the lake and creates a sense of the liminal, with Fontanals-Simmons’ first Welsh song securely fastening her otherness. Roderick Williams makes an engagingly sympathetic narrator; whilst the Man’s behaviour is frustratingly stupid, Williams makes it seem natural. Williams as story-teller is in his element leading you on, and when Fontanals-Simmons engages him in dialogue the results have moments of excitement.

Higgins’ lake is a place of magic, orchestral magic, with a Tippett-esque evocation of Spring, a vivid solo violin dancing at the Summer wedding and the more sombre mood for Winter. After the final blow, the piece becomes positively gripping as Fontanals-Simmons gives an almost ritualised reciting of everything that the Man is losing as they return to the water with her. The vividly realised orchestration finally leaves the Man, alone and bereft as the music returns to the lake.

Higgins mines the cyclical nature of the story and of Simmons’ libretto, whilst his eye for orchestral detail means that each movement is different. And overall there is a strong feeling of the clash of cultures echoed in the different sound worlds.

The Faerie Bride is a very particular piece, it is described in the booklet notes as an oratorio. Perhaps. I heard it live in Gloucester Cathedral and whilst the performance as heard here was fine indeed, the cathedral was not the ideal venue. The work was premiere at Aldeburgh and a venue the size of the Maltings is perhaps more ideal. The recording hardly sounds live, in that it has an admirable depth and detail whilst slips are few. The microphones rather bring the soloists forward which, frankly, is no bad thing.

There is a complexity and detail to Higgins’ orchestral writing that means having this disc gives us leisure to explore these fascinating works in greater detail. And thankfully, there is more to come.

Gavin Higgins recently signed to Nimbus Music Publishing (which celebrated its 10th anniversary last week), making the company’s fourth composer, the other three being Richard Blackford, Augusta Read Thomas and George Lloyd. NMP takes a joined up approach, so that we can hear the music on disc and buy the scores (the music for the three works on this disc is already available from NMP). To come later this year is a recording of Higgins’ tour de force, the Concerto Grosso for Brass Band and Orchestra which premiered at the BBC Proms in 2022.  

Faber has announced the publication, in April 2025, of Sakla, Francesca Simon’s first book for adults, a tale directly inspired by her libretto for The Faerie Bride. Further details from Simon’s website.