Richard Watkins is at the forefront of promoting contemporary music for the horn. He has given premières of concertos by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Nigel Osborne, Magnus Lindberg, Dominic Muldowney, Nicola LeFanu, and Colin and David Matthews.

The Goldberg Ensemble is committed to performing and commissioning new music, particularly by British composers.

This new recording features a collection of works for string ensemble commissioned by the Goldberg Ensemble including Roger Marsh's haunting Canto 1, based on Dante's Paradiso; Nicola Lefanu's lyrical Amores for horn and string ensemble; Anthony Gilbert's Palace of the Winds inspired by the elaborately ornate Hawa Mahal palace in Jaipur and Geoffrey Poole's Crossing Ohashi Bridge, an abstract work inspired by chaos mathematics such as Fractals, Mandelbrot sets, and named after the Hiroshige painting Sudden shower over Shin-Ôhashi bridge, as featured on the front cover of this disc.