In 1968, when Sir Adrian Boult recorded the two Elgar Symphonies for Lyrita, he wrote an open letter to Gramophone, couched diplomatically but reflecting his fury that at the sessions his recording manager had forced him on technical grounds to have all the violins on the left instead of his usual habit of dividing them between the two sections. I confess that background information set me against the finished discs; but 40 years on the comparisons with Boult’s other recordings of the Elgar symphonies demonstrate very clearly how fine they are, arguably the finest versions he ever recorded.

Compared with the EMI versions recorded less than five years later, they are tauter, the ensemble noticeably crisper. The recording is brighter and clearer in this transfer. The difference is particularly marked in No 2 which, as Elgar said, was a work which Boult was the first conductor to make a success after the disappointing reception given at its premiere.

The comparison is closer with the mono recording of No 2, which Boult recorded with the BBC SO in 1945, a superb performance but which is still marginally outshone by the Lyrita version.

The Dutton issue of “Elgar conducts Elgar” is also valuable. It was Mike Dutton, when he was at EMI, who supervised the transfer of all of Elgar’s electrical recordings. That set has been available only intermittently, which makes Dutton’s revised transfers of these three works specially valuable, particularly the 1928 recording of the Cello Concerto with Beatrice Harrison. It now has a satisfying weight and body, though Harrison’s wiry tone is not to everyone’s taste and the intonation is occasionally suspect.

The Falstaff, made at the opening of EMI’s Abbey Road Studios in 1931, has always been impressive in transfers, and the recording of the Nursery Suite made in the same year with the dedicatees, the Duke and Duchess of York and Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret present, comes out brightly and clearly. The Royals were particularly delighted with “The Wagon Passes”, with the whistling of the carter charmingly portrayed. The septuagenarian Elgar put love into his performance, as he did also in Falstaff with its swaggering Prince Hal theme and tragic epilogue which so echoes the epilogue of Strauss’s Don Quixote.