There’s so much impassioned, noble drama in Martyn Brabbins’s performance of the Prelude to Elgar’s oratorio The Kingdom that his matter-of-fact account of the First Symphony is perplexing. Where’s the sense of quiet longing in the opening march or the tense push-and-pull of the Allegro that follows? And why is the Symphony’s battle-scarred conclusion dispatched so dispassionately? It doesn’t help that the Flemish Radio Orchestra’s strings are unable to provide the kind of whipcrack precision required in the second movement, though they do offer affecting warmth in the Adagio.

Richard Hickox’s recording of the First Symphony (8/07) glosses over some details but compellingly conveys the music’s narrative thrust, at least, and the BBC NOW play with fierce conviction. Hickox is slightly less successful in Anthony Payne’s profoundly brilliant elaboration of the sketches for the unfinished Third Symphony. The very opening, for example, sounds somewhat flabby, especially compared with the gritty grandeur that Colin Davis evokes (LSO Live). The opening of the Scherzo is also rhythmically slack, weighing down the music’s gossamer-like texture, though Hickox takes off in the movement’s second part, where he gives an ardent lift to the sudden surges of nobilmente lyricism. And the interpretation comes into its own from there: the Adagio solenne is achingly intense, and the finale has ample swagger as well as a powerful feeling of tragic foreboding.

Hickox also gives us the premiere recording of Payne’s realisation of the Pomp and Circumstance March No 6. A distant cousin of the C minor March (No 3), it has a similar bite and dark insistence, yet is also more elusive harmonically and – frankly – less tuneful. As always, Payne’s preternatural understanding of Elgar’s style and sound world is astonishing. Hickox’s performance is authoritative, too, and his stately interpretation of the memorial ode So many true princesses who have gone (orchestrated by Payne) is stirring, though I prefer David Lloyd-Jones’s intimate, enraptured reading (Dutton, 5/05).