Pieter Wispelwey was 27 in 1989 and had already recorded the first volume of a set of Bach’s Solo Cello Suites when he met C Jared Sacks, an American horn player, sound engineer and producer living in Amsterdam. Sacks founded Channel Classics in 1990, and Wispelwey’s completed set of the Suites became one of the fledgling company’s initial releases. By the time the cellist left the label in 2009, just two decades later, he’d recorded well over 30 albums traversing a sizeable portion of the instrument’s standard repertoire and then some (fortunately, a few fine recordings originally made for the Globe label are included in this 35-disc retrospective).

That initial Bach set revealed Wispelwey as a daring interpreter with often thought-provoking ideas about the music’s gestures and rhetoric. That said, I far prefer his 2009 remake, as it flows more naturally while preserving the earlier interpretation’s striking individuality. That second set is quite marvellous, in fact. I sat and listened to it in its entirety one long evening and felt a sublime sense of emotional catharsis in the Sarabande of the Sixth Suite (played on an anonymous 18th-century violoncello piccolo), which Wispelwey offers as a kind of supplication.

He also recorded Beethoven’s complete solo cello works twice: first on a splendid Barak Norman cello from 1710 with fortepiano (featuring Paul Komen in the sonatas and the brilliant Lois Shapiro in the variations); then on a 1760 Guadagnini with a modern piano (played by Dejan Lazić). I love how the performers seize upon the music’s essential weirdness in the former accounts, and somehow that wild sense of discovery is preserved on modern instruments, too.

The ease with which Wispelwey moves between period and modern practice is a marvel and an excellent reason to root around in this box. His various recordings with Florilegium are all exquisite, for example – try, say, his svelte and stylish readings of the two Haydn concertos – but then turn to the two Shostakovich concertos, the First lean, plangent and hard hitting (with Richard Tognetti and the Australian Chamber Orchestra), the Second inky dark and grimly lyrical (with the Sinfonietta Cracovia), and you might hardly believe they’re from the same cellist.

Wispelwey shines in Romantic music, too. The sense of delicacy he brings to both the Schumann and the Saint-Saëns First Concerto connect both scores to Mendelssohn’s influence in a way I’d never previously considered (what a pity Mendelssohn’s two sonatas aren’t here). And while his 1995 reading of the Dvořák (with Lawrence Renes and the Netherlands Philharmonic) is urgently passionate to the point of impatience at times, his 2006 remake (with Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra) is equally exciting but more settled, and maintains a sense of a singing line even in declamatory passages.

There are a few recordings here that I have little desire to return to: relatively wan performances of the two Brahms sonatas with a period piano (Paul Konen again), a Franck Sonata that doesn’t quite take wing (with Paolo Giacometti) and a creaky Arpeggione Sonata (also with Giacometti), although the three sonatinas (originally for violin) that fill out that disc are utterly delightful. But, happily, there are far more recordings here that I now wouldn’t want to be without: notably elegant interpretations of the three enchanting solo suites by Reger (so good they should win the composer new friends), an album of Chopin transcriptions, focusing on the waltzes, that’s not only a technical tour de force (listen to Wispelwey breeze through the flurries of semiquavers in the G major Prelude, for example) but a fine example of thoughtful programming, and an absolutely terrific Elgar Concerto (with Jac van Steen and the Netherlands Radio PO) that somehow flew under my radar all these years. Tender, blissfully unaffected yet rife with expressive detail, this is an interpretation of the Elgar I could contentedly live with.

There’s also an indispensable disc of sonatas by Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Britten (with Lazić) where the individuality of each work is made manifest – drama and steely resolve in the Shostakovich, lyrical largesse in the Prokofiev and the most kaleidoscopic reading of the Britten I’ve ever encountered. Oh, and Wispelwey’s white-knuckle reading of Prokofiev’s Symphony-Concerto (with Siniasky leading the Rotterdam Philharmonic) is not to be missed either.

The cellist’s commitment to contemporary music is represented by an all-Gubaidulina disc, a riveting Lutosławski Concerto, an hour-long early ballet score with electronics by Brett Dean, as well as shorter works by Crumb, Sculthorpe and others peppered throughout. The box’s contents are divided into four sections: Baroque chamber works, solo works of the 18th to 20th centuries, concertos, and chamber music with cello. I can’t say it’s the easiest arrangement to navigate if you’re in search of something specific but it’s great for going exploring. Chances are you’ll come up with something marvellous.

The recordings

The Complete Channel Classics Recordings

Pieter Wispelwey (Channel Classics (35 CDs) CCSBOX7624)