First performed at the Brighton Festival in 2004, Piers Hellawell's double concerto Cors de Chasse had its London premiere in this Philharmonia programme under Martyn Brabbins. Despite its title, the featured instruments are not hunting horns but trumpet and trombone; the soloists here, as in Brighton, were Hakan Hardenberger and Jonas Bylund.

This 15-minute single-movement work doesn't, in fact, make a feature of the horn calls that resonate as a symbol of farewell or warning in so much German romantic music. Hellawell actually took his title from a poem by Apollinaire in which the dying echoes of horns heard on the wind are likened to memories, and it's rather the way that memory operates over musical time that interests him. He also describes the piece as "a gradual slowing-down process", but it's the momentum of the result, and the inventiveness of its material, that strike the listener first. Nor is this a concerto that pits its two soloists against one another; often they operate as a unit, in front of a richly active background that sometimes recalls the busy textures of Birtwistle, though Hellawell's are less block-like and more lucid. At any event it maintained interest easily over its span, with Hardenberger and Bylund clearly relishing its challenges and the sheer character of its musical ideas.

The remainder of the programme consisted of classic works by English composers of earlier generations. Matthew Trussler was the perceptive soloist in Walton's Violin Concerto, whose ambiguous balance between tenderness and bitterness he judged to a nicety in an account equally notable for his flawless technical command.

Brabbins and the Philharmonia began with Elgar's In the South, giving its sumptuous textures a sheeny surface as well as an inner warmth and, crucially, a firm sense of direction, while Elgar's tribute to Cockaigne, the land of the Cockneys, was delivered with resounding vitality.