Vasily Petrenko’s reign on Merseyside is drawing to a close – he bows out at the end of the 2020-21 season – but the RLPO remains one of the busiest recording ensembles in the UK. With Andrew Manze they’re completing a Vaughan Williams cycle of considerable merit, while with Petrenko they’ve given us some truly impressive Elgar for Onyx, their Russian conductor showing that he is as comfortable with the idiom as his players. ‘Vasily Petrenko directs an admirably trim, affectionate and cannily paced Enigma,’ wrote Andrew Achenbach in May, ‘free of fussy intervention and marked by superb orchestral playing.’