Among the new releases this month is an historic recording of Elgar’s oratorio The Apostles, an album from LSO Live featuring Ralph Vaughan Williams’s expansive Symphony No 1, A Sea Symphony and one featuring four of the UK’s finest cellists and rediscovered lost masterpieces.
SOMM Recordings’ Elgar from the Archives series is creating a stir amongst Elgar lovers and historic performance enthusiasts alike; the label has now release Volume 5, which features the oratorio The Apostles, Op. 49 (1903) and the song cycle Sea Pictures, Op. 37
Since his youth, Edward Elgar had conceived of a large-scale work depicting the disciples of Jesus and their response to the extraordinary events they witnessed. When the Birmingham Triennial Music Festival commissioned him to write a new choral work, he began to compose an intended trilogy.
While the third part remains only in sketches, the first two – The Kingdom and The Apostles – are monumental contributions to British oratorio.
Living up to its reputation of presenting music that is out of the ordinary and off the beaten track, SOMM Recordings is releasing Wood on the Tracks with Cellophonics, four of the UK’s finest cellists who have been expanding the repertoire with a growing list of exciting new works and rediscovered lost masterpieces.
The quartet – Christopher Allan, Adrian Bradbury, Ian Burdge, and Ben Rogerson – having gathered a whole concert’s worth of commissions and discoveries, was invited by SOMM to record this debut album.
Wood on the Tracks includes first recordings of works commissioned from Simon Baggs, Guy Barker, Roderick Elms, Julia Simpson, and Rowland Sutherland and forgotten gems by William Alwyn, York Bowen, and Marie Dare.
On the new album from LSO Live, Chief Conductor Sir Antonio Pappano conducts the London Symphony Orchestra in a pair of evocative British works: Ralph Vaughan Williams’s expansive Symphony No 1, A Sea Symphony and Elizabeth Maconchy’s dream-like Nocturne for Orchestra.
Premiered in 1910, Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No 1 was the first choral symphony of its kind by a British composer. This blazing celebration of the sea transforms text from Walt Whitman’s visionary poetry into an epic orchestral voyage.
Composed in 1950, Maconchy’s Nocturne for Orchestra depicts a meditative yet unsettling night under a journeying moon. Despite the pastoral influence of her formative teacher Vaughan Williams, this atmospheric miniature more closely reflects the composer’s interest in central European modernism.
On 25 September 2026, UK violinist Thomas Bowes, releases a new album of Elgar’s Violin Concerto recorded in Studio 1, Abbey Road, the same studio where Elgar recorded the concerto with Yehudi Menuhin in 1932.
The recording is on the Rubicon label. Also on the album are five of Elgar’s shorter works for violin in new arrangements for violin and orchestra by eminent composer, Eleanor Alberga OBE, Bowes’s life partner of over thirty years.