This first volume of Mark Bebbington’s planned recording of the complete piano music of Sir Arthur Bliss ranges wide over the full span of his career. Very well played and vividly recorded in Symphony Hall, Birmingham, the earliest item, the curiously named May-Zeeh of 1910, is just a tuneful little salon piece in waltz time, while the last, the Miniature Scherzo of 1969, is a tiny piece designed to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the Musical Times and was written only six years before Bliss’s death in 1975.

The first item on the disc, the four Valses fantastiques of 1913, owes something to Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales, published just before. Already they mark a stylistic advance but one has to wait for the pieces written in the 1920s, when in America Bliss met and married his wife, Trudy, before the radical Bliss emerges. The Toccata of 1925 is a vigorous piece, as is the Study of 1927 with its sharp cross-rhythms, splendidly enunciated by Mark Bebbington. Between them comes the little Intermezzo of 1912, an inspiration amiable to the point of sounding a little bland.

It is in the Piano Sonata of 1952 that one finds Bliss spreading his wings a great deal more in three substantial movements, fast-slow-fast, though curiously what is evidently a misprint lists the middle movement as Allegro sereno (Bliss himself describes it as ‘slow and serene’). It comes in variation form, where the first movement starts with a waltz leading to a gently lyrical second subject. The vigorous finale is the most brilliant movement technically, a test for any pianist.

The Suite for piano of 1925 was one of the pieces which was inspired by the composer’s love-affair with his wife-to-be – four strongly characterised genre pieces: Overture, Polonaise, Elegy, and Variations as a vigorous conclusion. The Miniature Scherzo makes a sparkling epilogue. None of this may be earth-shatteringly original music but, as presented here, it offers a vivid portrait of one of the most important British composers of his period.