TECHNOLOGY led the way, goaded by professional frustration. Since generating CDs had become relatively easy, why couldn’t an orchestra produce its own recordings, live or in a studio, market them to its audiences on the internet or get them retailed in shops? Big-label bureaucracy would be removed; everything would be under the orchestra’s control. Tempting.

In the mid 1990s the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra made steps towards some of these goals with the Tring International Royal Philharmonic Collection — budget-priced discs of mainstream repertoire, plus Tavener and Nyman. But the first organisation to pick up the entire reins itself was the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, whose RLPO Live was born in 1998.

This week it is the Hallé Orchestra’s turn, with three studio discs of Elgar and Nielsen from the conductor who has lifted the orchestra from recent doldrums, Mark Elder.

These homegrown labels are not a development that the majors’ classics division chiefs particularly welcome. EMI Classics, indeed, has become so riled by LSO Live that they have stopped hiring the London Symphony Orchestra for their own recording projects.

But if some musicians may be losing earnings in the long term with these new labels, for the punter there are nothing but gains. Here before us at mid-price on CD HLL 7500 is a superb Elgar Symphony No 1, with a highly pleasurable Enigma Variations and Cockaigne on CD HLL 7501. “Orchestra the finest I ever heard,” Elgar wrote to his friend Jaeger when the Hallé played the Cockaigne overture in 1901. You might well be inclined to agree as you hear the simple nobility Elder extracts from the Nimrod variation, his delicately expressive string portamentos or the natural ease and beauty that fills the symphony’s opening theme. Elder’s interpretations always flow without effort.

The Hallé venture also benefits from canny packaging. LSO Live discs, half the price at £4.99, sometimes contain almost half the music: Sir Colin Davis’s new Dvorák Symphony No 7 (LSO0014), without fillers, occupies just 40 minutes. The Hallé discs also have novelty value. Their world premiere extras may not last long, but the addition of the original Enigma finale (shorter, less pompous than the usual) or the charmingly silly Entrance March to Nielsen’s Aladdin music on CD HLL 7502 enhances that pleasant feeling of getting value for money.

The Nielsen disc, packed with the Flute Concerto (Andrew Nicholson) and the combative Symphony No 5, is another winner. Elder drives the Hallé towards understanding with intelligence and sensitivity. The side-drum-haunted Fifth grows organically phrase by phrase; you feel the orchestra blooming inside Elder’s grip. Later releases will include historic Hallé recordings from the archives. All three discs are available from www.halle.co.uk.

Running time apart, LSO Live’s Dvorák disc, taped in March 2001, has many attractions: near-faultless playing, genuine drama and poetry. Placed alongside, Vaclav Neumann’s 1981 account with the Czech Philharmonic, newly recycled on Supraphon, seems rhythmically staid, though it offers one quality that the LSO misses: local Cezch colouring.

The RLPO in their own way are breaking fresh ground. Their first homegrown disc featured Scheherezade. Now on some discs they mix English classics with works unperformed for decades. Frederic Austin (1872-1952), composer, baritone, teacher, is their favourite discovery, and his Symphony, completed in 1913, is proudly presented in Heritage & Legacy 2, along with Elgar, Bliss and Hamish MacCunn (ClassCD 1501).

The style suggests a Delius who took keep-fit classes; muscular, virile music, with a sense of purpose, in four interlinked movements. Douglas Bostock, doughty champion of the forgotten, conducts persuasively.

EMI Classics, I assume, had no plans to record it.