David Pyatt, Gramophone's Young Artist of the Year in 1996, provides performances in which calm authority and high imagination fuse; and this disc comlements the nobility and urbanity of Dennis Brain. Although there can be no direct comparison with Anthony Halstead, Pyatt's is very much in that mode of supple, understated and often witty playing, accompanied by truly discriminating orchestral forces.
Soloist and orchestra create a constantly shifting and lively pattern of dynamic relationships.
Pyatt makes the music's song and meditation his own. Compared with the dark, dream-like cantabile of Brain, he offers in the Second Concerto an Andante of cultivated conversation and, in the Third, a Romanza of barely moving breath and light. His finales trip the light fantastic. The Second Concerto's springing rhythms reveal wonderfully clear high notes; the Third is nimble and debonair without being quite as patrician as Brain's; and the Fourth creates real mischief in its effervescent articulation. The cadenzas by Terry Wooding (to the first movements of the Third and Fourth Concertos) epitomise Pyatt's performances as a whole: longer and more daringly imaginative than those of Brain, while remaining sensitively scaled and fancifully idiomatic. The concertos are imaginatively and unusually coupled with a fine performance of the Horn Quintet in E flat.

Few horn players produce such a luscious sound as David Pyatt