POUL RUDERS (b.1949): Horn Trio, PELLE GUDMUNDSEN-HOLMGREEN (b.1932): Near Still Distant Still, SØREN NIELS EICHBERG (b.1973): Horn Trio.

Description: Ruders' four movements are in deliberately disparate styles, borrowing from largely atonal avant-gardism in the first, the second a darkly ironic little scherzo, with echoes of Shostakovich; the third is effectively a horn cadenza, Romantic horn-calls inflected by pitch-bending and a sonorous aura from the piano's resonant strings; the finale is a spiky, motoric toccata. Gudmunsen-Holmgreen begins with a meditative, introverted movement, followed by a jittery, percussive scherzo and an odd finale, with laconic gestures and vocalizations. The Eichberg is more conventionally neo-romantic than the other works here, tonal, with a mid-20th-century emphasis on rhythm and a sense of postmodern irony in its unconventional shifts of harmony and texture. The Danish Horn Trio.