When the highlights of Alison Balsom’s last album, Jubilo, were its handful of works recorded not on a modern instrument but on the natural, valveless Baroque trumpet, it’s good news indeed to have her now focusing entirely on it for this latest recording. In terms of scale alone, the programme’s main acts are new transcriptions by Simon Wright of Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks and a suite from Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, designed ‘to elevate the natural trumpet and place it front and centre’ by means of what sound like some fairly dramatic scoring decisions: Balsom joined brass-wise only by other natural trumpeters, no woodwind at all, and the remainder of the orchestra taken down to the chamber realms of just four violins, viola, continuo and timpani. Still, when Handel’s original scoring already made much of three natural trumpets, when the engineering here pushes Balsom and her five natural trumpet colleagues right into the limelight, when the timpani is still gloriously rumbling away and when David Goode’s organ continuo is richly underpinning the lot, the sound is smoother but not actually noticeably smaller. For me, though, the album’s real gold lies in its two D major solo trumpet works by Purcell and Telemann: the ravishingly soft and lyrical solemnity Balsom brings to the opening Adagio of Telemann’s first Trumpet Concerto; the suppleness she brings to the Purcell Sonata’s outer movements and the luminous, clean-toned sobriety of its strings-only Adagio.