The first public performance was at the Royal Festival Hall, London, on 15 February 1998, by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrew Davis.
Elgar worked on the new piece during the last year of his life, jotting down short snatches of bars, as well as composing pages in full score.
Reed reproduced more than forty pages of the most important sketches in his book Elgar as I Knew Him, probably to illustrate what he believed to be the impossibility of weaving them into a coherent whole.
[1] In 1974, a BBC Radio 3 producer, Dr Roger Fiske, devised a programme about the Symphony, and orchestrated some of the sketches, completing Elgar's unfinished score and composing some other passages.
Johnstone felt strongly that the broadcast would amount to "tinkering" with the score and he persuaded Boult to withdraw from the project on ethical grounds and the programme was subsequently dropped.
According to Payne, "The finale's main subject actually suggests this kind of treatment, and it would lead the music away into some new visionary world, spanning the years between the composer's death and my attempted realisation of his sketches.
The first recording was made for the NMC label by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Andrew Davis, in October 1997, four months before the first public performance.