Mark Elder has long been a champion of this substantial score. I have an off-air recording of an invigorating performance he gave with the Chicago SO in May 2000 and this new version finds him on even more invincible form. His reading clocks in around three minutes longer than Handley’s thrillingly combustible account (Chandos, 9/86 R ) but such is Elder’s hypnotic control that one is held spellbound.

Delius’s Idylle de printemps (1889) is, by comparison, small fry but exquisite all the same, much influenced by Grieg and quite beautifully served by these artists. It’s followed by “The March of Spring” from North Country Sketches, which is surveyed with such pliancy, sensitivity to nuance and pantheistic wonder that one hopes Elder can in time be persuaded to give us a recording of this magical work in its entirety.

The disc ends on another high with Frank Bridge’s exhilarating 1927 tone-poem Enter Spring, here given a performance of swaggering flair, fragrant atmosphere and bewitching refinement. Not only is Elder adept at teasing out the myriad details in Bridge’s meticulous orchestral canvas, his bracingly cogent conception also manages to stress this music’s more daringly progressive, “continental” features without stinting on its gorgeous local colour. My only tiny gripe surrounds the principal trumpet’s top D seven bars before the end (20’08”), an octave higher than marked in the score and an emendation which sounds a touch flashy in the context of an otherwise scrupulously observant and tasteful display. No matter; Elder’s remains a truly cherishable account of a great work to crown a collection that bids fair to be one of my records of the year.