This is the first recording of an Elgar symphony on surround-sound SACD and very impressive it is, bringing out the glory of Elgar’s orchestral imagination, not least in the heart-warming writing for brass, with the horns whooping magnificently, given extra separation in the opulent recording. The comparisons I have listed all wear their years remarkably well, even Elgar’s own of 1929 in Michael Dutton’s superb transfers, but the extra fullness and warmth of the latest recording adds an extra dimension in more ways than one. Even the fine 1985 recording for Vernon Handley in what has now become a classic version yields very much on the question of high violin tone, even though the higher transfer level is some compensation.

Interpretatively, Richard Hickox with the excellent BBC National Orchestra of Wales steers a distinctive course on the key question of the tempo for the surging 12/8 rhythms of the first movement. Elgar himself in both his recordings chose a speed far faster than we are used to today and Solti – following up the success of his recording of the First Symphony firmly echoing the composer’s example – also chooses a speed very much on the fast side. Vernon Handley, on the other hand, in a reading which echoes and in some ways idealises what might be described as the approach of his mentor, Adrian Boult, adopts a markedly broader speed, allowing the compound-time triplets to spring more readily.

Hickox, clearly mindful of both traditions, giving many signs that he has studied the composer’s own example, adopts a midway course, almost as fast as Elgar and Solti at the start, and like them keeping the second theme at the same tempo, relaxing only when the main second subject appears. He also follows the example of the composer on the arrival of the recapitulation where Handley, following Boult, introduces a marked pause before the main theme emerges in full glory, a wonderfully dramatic effect. That pause reflects the marking of two diagonal lines in the score, a very legitimate reading, where Hickox, like Elgar, allows only a fractional pause, launching directly into the main theme.

In the slow movement, by contrast, Hickox adopts a broader tempo than Handley and sustains it well, controlling the climaxes with an idiomatic touch, graduating dynamics with the utmost care and drawing pianissimi from the strings of the utmost delicacy, beautifully caught in the wide-ranging recording. The transparency of sound brings extra benefits in the Scherzo, too, the players unfazed by a tempo as daringly fast as Elgar’s own; and in the finale the lightness and transparency of many passages, not least the epilogue, bring out the tenderness behind this ultimately elegiac movement.

The Overture In the South makes a valuable supplement in a reading warmer than Solti’s, if rather less high-powered. The viola solo in the central Nocturne or Canto popolare is beautifully done at a spacious speed, and the ripeness of the thrilling coda brings a final demonstration of this orchestra’s impressive quality, built up over recent years.