Fifty years after his death, what are we to make of the composer and pianist born George Percy Grainger (it was not until about 1912 that he abandoned “George” and inserted his mother’s maiden name, Aldridge, after “Percy”)? The general affection for his best-known works remains undimmed, yet the vast majority of his output remains outside the standard repertoire and, with few exceptions (the haunting Shallow Brown, for instance, and A Bridal Lullaby, used in the film Howard’s End), unknown to the average music lover. As a pianist, he is never included among the ranks of the all-time greats. Two outstanding celebratory sets might provoke us to think again.

On 19 Chandos discs, recorded between 1992 and 2003, are the almost complete works, a collection that allows us to see how much more there was to Grainger than Country Gardens and “Shepherd’s Hey”. “Almost complete” because several significant scores have still to be recorded, according to Barry Peter Ould, secretary and musical archivist of the Percy Grainger Society whose performing editions and realisations appear throughout this set. Ould, too, is responsible for the invaluable booklet which contains, in alphabetical order, authoritative notes on each of the 186 works presented here and full texts for all the vocal items. Grainger was a serial re-arranger of his own work and it’s a pity that the annotation did not extend to including which version was on which disc. It would have been useful to know where, for example, one could quickly find the six different versions of “Shepherd’s Hey”, the eight of “Colonial Song”, and the no fewer than nine of Irish Tune from County Derry (the finest of which is surely the wordless choral and orchestra setting on disc 4, heard in a performance every bit as good as that on John Eliot Gardiner’s Gramophone Award-winning Grainger collection, 4/96). The BBC Philharmonic and the City of London Sinfonia (both on top form) under the late Richard Hickox take the lion’s share of the orchestral works; Mark Padmore, Stephen Varcoe and Pamela Helen Stephen are among the characterful (sometimes rather too fruity) vocalists; the indefatigable Penelope Thwaites is the spirited Chandos Grainger house pianist, though I shan’t be throwing out my five Martin Jones volumes on Nimbus. With 127 premiere recordings, 19 CDs for the price of four has to be the bargain of the year.

APR provides a no less valuable and desirable Grainger-fest by releasing his complete 78rpm solo recordings from 1908‑45, the first time they have been issued together. Not quite complete: lying in the American Decca vaults are discs of Grainger playing his arrangements of “The man I love”, “Love walked in” and two works by the avant-garde composer Henry Cowell, some of whose works are dedicated to Grainger. APR’s five discs (two of acoustic sides, three of electrical) contain a total of 79 titles (including several duplications) lasting a total of 6 hours 30 minutes.

Grainger was one of the first pianists to be recorded by The Gramophone Company, his earliest sides dating from May 1908, one of which is the cadenza from the first movement of Grieg’s Piano Concerto, a work with which Grainger became closely identified, and a disc made only a year after his friend the composer’s death. Most of the music consists of the typical short encores of the day. These include incomparable recordings of his own works. More tellingly, and illustrating just how magnificent a pianist he was, are several major works: Schumann’s Piano Sonata No 2 and Etudes symphoniques, Brahms’s Piano Sonata No 3 (with a brief cut in the slow movement) and Chopin’s Piano Sonatas Nos 2 and 3, the former somewhat wooden, the latter, despite a subtle cut of 15 bars in the slow movement, still one of the greatest accounts on disc. It was made in 1925, the first-ever commercial electric recording. The finale is simply dazzling. Not to be missed, too, are the three hyphenated Bach titles with exuberant, lucidly voiced fugues, though I wish that APR had given them separate tracks. Ward Marston has produced quieter transfers of greater clarity and depth than previous releases of Grainger 78s (Pearl, Biddulph). The booklet (John Bird) and annotation are up to APR’s usual high standards. Frankly, with these two sets on your shelves, you won’t need any others to tell you all you need to know about the one-off that was Percy Aldridge Grainger.