During a prestigious career stretching back to 1981, the horn player Richard Watkins has held posts with the Fires of London, London Sinfonietta and Philharmonia; he is currently a member of the Nash Ensemble and a founder member of London Winds. NMC’s enterprising and thoroughly absorbing sequence shows him to be an imperious exponent of his craft and a wonderfully instinctive musician to boot.

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies wrote Sea Eagle (a solo ‘study’ in three movements) for Watkins in 1982, and the dedicatee’s performance compels in its consummate technical mastery and penetrating poetic scope. Next, Watkins teams up with tenor Mark Padmore and composer/pianist Huw Watkins (no relation!) for an arresting reading of Gerald Barry’s enjoyably hallucinatory Jabberwocky (2012). Huw’s cellist brother, Paul, features in three items: both Colin Matthews’s lucid and rewarding Three of a Kind and Robin Holloway’s comparably nourishing 2010 11 Trio for horn, cello and piano were written expressly for this ad hoc ensemble of namesakes, while Mark-Anthony Turnage’s sincerely felt Prayer for a Great Man is a straight lifting of a movement from his 2010 Cello Concerto (the scoring is for horn and cello alone). Composed for the Nash Ensemble in 2010, David Matthews’s Quintet for horn and string quartet has tumbling fantasy and lyrical grace in abundance. Last, but definitely not least, Huw Watkins’s own shrewdly paced and keenly proportioned 2009 Trio for horn, violin and piano strikes me as a real find; violinist Laura Samuel makes an excellent showing here.

With detailed booklet-notes and pleasing sound emanating from no fewer than four different venues, this is a most valuable collection in every respect.