Brass music continues to flourish in the UK, as these discs confirm. “Something New” focuses on the repertoire of the excellent Mardi Brass quintet. Chuck’s Big Leaps is James Hesford’s fusion of Chuck Berry and John Coltrane, rock‘n’roll meets progressive jazz with engaging consequences, while Nigel Waddington’s Four Miniatures include the bittersweet impression “September” and the energetic accumulation of ideas in “Bigger Pictures”. Jan Bach’s Rounds and Dances is a more extrovert exploration of ensemble virtuosity – at its most potent in the understated canonic layering of “Idyl” that spills over into the effervescent final “Galop” – while Michael Nyman’s Masque Arias is drawn from music to the film Prospero’s Books, its early Baroque stylisations more appealing heard in this medium. The highlight, though, is John McCabe’s Hawk in Winter Light – an evocation of motion set against stasis that is as eloquent as it is understated.

In the band domain, Foden’s Richardson Band continue to set the pace. “New Music for Brass Band” is a fine showcase, but the elegiac outer sections of Richard Rodney Bennett’s Flowers of the Forest are arguably more arresting than the depiction of the Battle of Flodden Field. The motivic ingenuity and capricious manner of The Alchymist’s Journal suggest Kenneth Hesketh is as much at home here as with wind band, and how good to have a recording of the teenage George Benjamin’s scintillating Altitude. The aggression of Judith Bingham’s Prague confirms it as no mere suite touristique, though only the quixotic “Charles Bridge” lingers in the memory, but Philip Wilby’s Shadow Songs is a memorial whose rapt introspection and superfine shadings outline new territory. Variations on a Theme of Tippett was commissioned for the composer’s centenary: of its five movements, those by Edward Gregson and Elgar Howarth show equal identity with the Tippett idiom as with the chosen medium, while Wilby’s “Birthday Fugue and Finale” concludes the suite with coursing dynamism.

Both discs are superbly recorded, in acoustics appropriate to their content, with detailed booklet-notes. Anyone attracted to either medium or to brass music in general should not hesitate.