A handful of items we’ve had before – that unforgettable treatment of Kipling’s execution ballad Danny Deever, the exuberant and prodigally inventive Tribute to Foster and the darkly compelling setting of Swinburne’s The Bride’s Tragedy – but for the most part these are premiere recordings. Some remarkable discoveries there are, too. Take the giddily imaginative Thanksgiving Song from 1947, a paean to the fairer sex of which Grainger only managed to complete the third and final movement (he preferred the term ‘last tone-bout’). The first half builds up a tremendous head of steam before a daringly protracted pause ushers in a ravishing postlude (symbolising, as Grainger himself put it, ‘womankind’s contribution to terrestrial immortality’) which fades to nothingness. In the extraordinary Marching Song of Democracy (inspired by the humanist message of Walt Whitman and composed between 1900 and 1917), wordless vocal parts (or ‘a freely-moving many-voicedness’) combine with orchestral colours of intoxicating yet never cloying opulence (the piece also shares at least one thematic idea with the ballet The Warriors). The Lads of Wamphray is another treat, a splendidly lusty treatment of the folk-poem from Sir Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-03) evincing a penetrating harmonic scope that always keeps you listening, and the same goes for King Solomon’s Espousals (from the Song of Solomon), The Wraith of Odin (to words from Longfellow’s The Saga of King Olaf), the boisterous The Hunter in his Career and comparably breezy Sir Eglamore.

Performances throughout are pretty much exemplary, these combined Melbourne and Sydney forces straining every sinew under Sir Andrew Davis’s lucid lead, and they have been accorded sound of splendiferous realism and at times almost startling physical impact. Barry Peter Ould’s annotation carries the requisite authority.