The disc’s title, ‘Elgar: A Self-Portrait’, is no doubt intended to reflect the fact that The Music Makers has copious quotations from earlier Elgar works, not least the Enigma Variations. Yet, as Michael Kennedy points out in his authoritative notes, in many ways all of Elgar’s works have an element of self-portraiture. What matters is that this disc, recorded in the Bridgewater Hall in March 2005, is another excellent instalment in Mark Elder’s Elgar series.

The centrepiece is The Music Makers, here given a performance that is above all refined, with the full-ranging recording bringing out the subtlety of Elgar’s orchestration. If the Boult version is generally even warmer, with Dame Janet Baker peerless in the solo mezzo role, achieving a heartfelt weight of expression that the excellent Jane Irwin with her much lighter mezzo cannot match, Elder’s reading is also strong and purposeful. The high contrasts are underlined, thanks to modern sound, between the reflective passages and such incisive choral outbursts as ‘With wonderful deathless ditties’, all sung with crisp ensemble by the Hallé Choir directed by James Burton. As a subsidiary comparison I looked out the excerpts that Elgar himself recorded live in Hereford Cathedral, indifferently recorded in 1927 and included in EMI’s sadly deleted Elgar Edition. Again Elgar himself is warmer and more volatile, even if the Festival Chorus is no match for those on the more modern versions.

I also used Elgar’s own recording for my comparisons on Froissart, his first major orchestral work, along with Barbirolli’s vintage version recorded not with the Hallé but the New Philharmonia. There again the refinement of the new Elder version is what marks it out, with both Barbirolli and Elgar himself swaggering even more flamboyantly in this work celebrating medieval chivalry, reflecting the writings of the 14th-century French chronicler Jean Froissart. In the two contrasted little pieces, Dream Children, Elder draws tenderly delicate performances from the orchestra; and in the arrangement of Bach’s great organ Fantasia and Fugue in C minor, Elder relishes the exotic orchestral effects just as much as the composer himself did in his recording, with the enormous advantage of superb modern digital sound.