Elgar/Payne: Symphony No 3; Pomp and Circumstance March No 6; So Many True Princesses, Adrian Partington Singers/BBC National Orchestra of Wales/Hickox

By my reckoning, Richard Hickox's performance of Anthony Payne's "elaboration" of Elgar's sketches for a third symphony is the fourth version to appear on disc; it seems to go out of its way to establish a different interpretative approach from that of its predecessors. Especially in the first movement, Hickox invests the work with far less drama than we have heard before, thus robbing the opening of some of its almost theatrical grandeur and concentrating instead on maintaining its symphonic coherence. Even if he can do little with the salon-music-like scherzo, easily the weakest element in Payne's generally magnificent realisation, Hickox makes the rest totally convincing. Elgar completists will need to acquire the disc for the other tracks, too: the first recording of Pomp and Circumstance March No 6, another piece of musical resuscitation by Payne based on even more slender material, and the memorial ode for Queen Alexandra, So Many True Princesses Who Have Gone, Elgar's charming but slight setting from 1932 of a text by John Masefield, which Payne has orchestrated with perfect tact.