Initially entitled Fragments of Elgar and premièred in August 1997 by David Owen Norris with the Dartington Festival Orchestra under Graeme Jenkins, Robert Walker’s performing realisation of Elgar’s Piano Concerto from the composer’s sketches, drafts and recordings nearly made it onto disc five years ago. Following those never-to-be-released sessions for Nimbus at Birmingham’s Symphony Hall during the autumn of 1999, Walker continued to refine his thoughts – and the finished article is nothing if not intriguing.

Elgar’s earliest ideas for the concerto date from 1913 and he tinkered with it on and off for the next two decades. I noted at least three themes which should already be familiar to Elgarians, two of which hail from the set of five Improvisations for solo piano that Elgar committed to hot wax – though never to paper – for HMV in November 1929. (You can hear them on Volume 3 of EMI’s Elgar Edition, 8/93; and Owen Norris has since recreated them to most moving effect for Elgar Editions, 11/03.) The concerto’s dainty central intermezzo is an expanded version of the Fourth Improvisation, which in turn shares its main theme with the manuscript of a two-piano short score that Elgar had given to Harriet Cohen. The rondo finale (which follows without a break) opens with a pensive solo idea that Elgar later clothed in altogether more defiant garb to launch the equivalent movement in his Third Symphony.

Whether Walker’s efforts capture the public imagination like Anthony Payne’s elaboration of the Third Symphony remains to be seen. For all the shrewd thematic, contrapuntal and harmonic dexterity of the finale in particular, his score (to my ears, at any rate) perhaps doesn’t quite evince the entrancing flow, rapt intuition and innate good taste of Payne’s masterly achievement. What’s not in question, however, is the dashing conviction exhibited by David Owen Norris, who enjoys splendid backing from the BBC Concert Orchestra under David Lloyd-Jones.

The disc’s remaining contents embrace four more world-premiere recordings, most notably So Many True Princesses (entitled Queen Alexandra Memorial Ode), a wistful setting of John Masefield from 1932 for chorus and miliary band and given here in a sensitive orchestration by Anthony Payne. Proceedings conclude with the Elegy in Memory of Edward Elgar by Anthony Collins, an impassioned threnody from 1942 based on the opening bars from the Third Symphony’s Adagio solenne slow movement.

Excellent Abbey Road sound and balance enhance the attractions of a bold release, which inquisitive readers should certainly try and sample for themselves.Andrew Achenbach

The Piano Concerto is lucky. Unlike the Third Symphony, Elgar didn’t make a deathbed plea for his sketches of the work to be left untouched; so the asinine furore that greeted Anthony Payne’s reconstruction of the symphony is unlikely to be repeated.

There is, of course, another view. More than 60 years ago Basil Maine felt that Elgar’s exhortation about his sketches for the symphony didn’t simply stop at refusing completion; ‘he was also anxious that there should be no critical comment on those fragments that remained of his greatness’. And Maine eventually concluded that ‘not even the most expert Elgarian could convey so much as an echo of what the last symphony was to have been’.

In effect, leave the bits well alone. Yet in today’s changed climate, it was a pretty fair bet that when copyright ended, attempts would be made to reconstruct both works. Payne and Robert Walker have set standards against which others that are likely to follow (Mozart’s Requiem has had six different editions in 200 years) will have to be judged.

Was the concerto worth the effort? I think so, certainly in the first movement, a genuine Elgarian nobilmente with fleeting reminiscences of Rachmaninov, and in a second that both dances and yearns with equal charm. If the last raises odd doubts, it is nevertheless the most intriguing, because the ideas expressed suggest an intellect in a state of flux. Maine again: ‘Every creative artist waits for that final moment of crisis which determines the greatness or the ordinariness of the achievement. Elgar was still waiting for that final moment. The last revealing light had not yet broken upon his mind’. These fragments, filled and stitched, at least offer a clue to the light that might have cut through.