Vasily Petrenko’s first foray into Elgar on disc seems unfocused and immature. The account of Cockaigne, the concert-overture portrait of London, works well enough, bristling with attitude and extrovert good humour, but the symphony is far less convincing. Petrenko fatally misjudges the function of the processional with which the work opens and which is thematically responsible for so much that follows, right up to its appearance as the coda to the finale. Its first entry here sounds far too triumphalist, brash almost; when it does return at the end the effect is not one of reassurance, the affirmation of the “massive hope in the future” that Elgar himself described, but something much noisier, shallower, and not convincingly symphonic. That’s a shame, for the playing of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic is consistently first-rate, and much of what Petrenko does elsewhere in the work is better, though there are greater depths to be explored in the adagio and a sharper, diabolic edge to be found in the scherzo than we get here.
