The nature of Elgar’s musical language, with its elastic tempi and, as Parry once described, expressive ‘spasms’, has often proved a graveyard for non-British conductors. On the whole Vasily Petrenko injects the two Elgar works on this recording with passion and energy, aided by some dynamic playing from the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and a bright, compelling recording quality from the engineers.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the shifting sands of the First Symphony’s epic opening movement, with its extraordinary abundance (almost, one might say, overabundance) of thematic ideas, where Petrenko drives the music forwards with tremendous energy, yet, at the same time, leaving room for those characteristic delicate parenthetical moments in the development. The Scherzo, another movement super-saturated with thematic invention, has considerable élan, though perhaps towards the end, when the music breaks into reflective poetry, it seems a little hurried. Nevertheless, Petrenko judges the shape and tempo of the thematically related slow movement well, sympathetically negotiating the introspective last bars with some intensity and yearning. The Allegro of the finale is lively but not so much that it becomes incoherent (how I remember the scramble of Solti’s interpretation), although, with the recapitulation of the motto march theme, it does seem a little bit too frenetic.

Petrenko’s reading of Cockaigne leaves me with the same impression – perhaps a little too precipitous in the faster sections, yet showing an empathy with Elgar’s more pensive side.