I have always found most moving the set of five Improvisations that Elgar recorded at the piano in 1929, straight on to hot wax. The results were not issued commercially at the time – to Elgar’s disappointment – and the playing technique is idiosyncratic, but the tangible presence of the great man is irresistible, as he embroiders on themes of his own and of other composers.

David Owen Norris has improvised on those improvisations, following the originals closely enough but ironing out some of the problems and adding a reprise to a particularly fine tune he feels Elgar would have repeated, had the 78 side-length allowed him. The results make one want to go back to the originals, since, as Owen Norris says, they ‘remind us of what can’t quite be written down’. His detailed commentary even suggests that the Improvisations can be regarded as a centre-piece of Elgar’s piano music, when improvising at the piano was something dear to him all his life. Each piece on the disc, ranging from the mazurka Chantant, written when he was 15, to two moving little salon pieces of 1932, Serenade and Adieu, has an Elgarian memorability, even the 22 seconds of Griffinesque.

Supplementing these original works are arrangements of the Imperial March of 1897 (a key work in his emergence as a composer) and the three Bavarian Dances of 1895-97. If the march loses much of its grandeur on the piano, the dances work remarkably well. Standing out from everything else, however, is the Concert Allegro of 1901, in which Owen Norris opens out the cuts Elgar made when it was criticised after Fanny Davies’s first public performance for being too long, repetitious and lacking in material.

Owen Norris explains that he ‘shone a powerful light through the paste-overs on the manuscript and deciphered what Elgar had originally written’. He deduces that the original performance was at fault. Certainly the result here justifies its length, a kaleidoscopic sequence that might almost be the greatest improvisation of all. This will be an endlessly fascinating disc for anyone interested in the composer.