This recording of contemporary British horn music is an interconnected and personal set of works by Robin Holloway (b. 1943) and his former student Peter Seabourne (b. 1960). Holloway’s long career as a composer has encompassed a professorship teaching composition at Cambridge, a regular column for 22 years in The Spectator and a highly regarded body of work that includes many commissions. Seabourne won a scholarship to study with Holloway in 1980. After achieving considerable success while still a student, Seabourne suffered a musical crisis from which it took 12 years to recover; he returned to composing in 2001.

The majority of his work collected here is both very recent and written especially for the other star of this show, Czech horn virtuoso Ondřej Vrabec (b. 1979). Vrabec has been principal horn for the Czech Philharmonic since the age of 17 and is also a renowned conductor. He enjoys an international reputation for dazzling technique and performances that sizzle with excitement, all of which is on show here in a programme that is a roughly even split between solo and ensemble material.

Works for solo horn include two partitas by Holloway, the first...