I was much taken with Kathryn Rudge’s contribution to Barry Wordsworth’s BBC CO anthology of orchestral songs by Elgar (Somm, 11/18), and this glowingly idiomatic account of Sea Pictures can only enhance her growing reputation. With her sensitivity to the text, freshness of timbre and secure vocal technique, she once again proves herself a strongly intuitive interpreter of this repertoire. Rudge is also fortunate to receive superbly attentive support from Vasily Petrenko and the RLPO, who are marvellously alive to the myriad textural subtleties and absorbing motivic interplay throughout Elgar’s illimitably rewarding orchestral canvas. My sole tiny gripe? Personally, I always hanker after the optional organ that adds such beguiling lustre to the culmination of ‘Sabbath Morning at Sea’. No matter, a Sea Pictures that rises in my estimation every time I return to it, and a worthy addition to digital-era versions from Sarah Connolly (on Naxos and Chandos, 12/06 and 11/14), Alice Coote (Hallé, 11/15) and Marie-Nicole Lemieux (Erato, A/19). I’m assuming you already possess the peerless Baker/Barbirolli collaboration (EMI/Warner, 12/65).

If anything, there’s even more to admire in the main offering, a deeply humane, unaffected and nobly integrated traversal of The Music Makers that all but matches Andrew Davis’s distinguished Chandos remake (12/18) in terms of poetic instinct, keen temperament and sheer emotional clout. Under Petrenko’s malleable lead the joint RLPO forces give of their fervent, articulate best: to experience them operating at full throttle try from 3'28" in track 10 (‘And therefore today is thrilling / With a past day’s late fulfilling’); and what memorably rapt hush they distil in that unforgettably moving passage beginning at 2'25" in track 11 (‘A little apart from ye’) with its achingly wistful juxtaposition of themes from the Violin Concerto and The Apostles. Rudge, too, covers herself in glory, not least in the incomparably tender setting of ‘But on one man’s soul it has broken / A light that doth not depart’ (track 10, from 1'16"), where the appearance of ‘Nimrod’ pays compassionate tribute to Elgar’s dear friend, August Jaeger. And towards the end (from 1'01" in track 13, to be precise), how affecting is Rudge’s refulgent delivery of ‘Bring us hither your sun and your summers / And renew our world as of yore; / You shall teach us your song’s new numbers’, not to mention her closing phrase ‘Yea, in spite of a dreamer who slumbers / And a singer who sings no more’, where Elgar weaves in one final, devastatingly poignant quotation of ‘Novissima hora est’ from Gerontius. No question about it, Petrenko’s abundantly communicative conception demands to be heard.

The digital album includes, by way of a bonus, a terrific Pomp and Circumstance March No 1 – swaggering, songful and ripely engineered. A most enticing release, in sum, which all Elgarians should seek out without delay.