A decade after Stravinsky’s death in New York (my feature last month mistakenly asserted Venice), Alexander Goehr observed how his popular reputation was founded on scarcely more than a handful of pieces. Little has changed since 1981. Going in search of a broader perspective from one of these anniversary sets, in one sense there is no comparison between them. The New Stravinsky Complete Edition from DG (almost) does what it says on the front of the box, whereas the Igor Stravinsky Edition from Warner Classics contains around two-thirds of his output. No Symphony in E flat, no Orpheus and very little composed after The Rake’s Progress in 1951. DG’s editorial contributions from Roger Wright, Richard Taruskin and Stephen Walsh also score over Hugues Mousseau’s brief essay for Warner, with its understandable in context but distinctly partial perspective on the late music.

To the question of whether you need a complete Stravinsky box, Mavra would be my first answer. By 1922 he seemed to have left his homeland in the past, or so all the Parisian modernists thought. Then he produced this half-hour, side-long glance back at mother Russia, dedicated with apparently genuine affection to the memory of Tchaikovsky (whose unfashionable Sleeping Beauty he had recently defended in print), Glinka (the source for more than one of the score’s parody numbers) and Pushkin, whose original story supplied the plot of a woman smuggling her lover into the house as a cook (no mention of Ravel or L’heure espagnole from a decade earlier, but that would have been telling). Mavra is unclassifiable, a Russian-language cabaret revue, a failure at the time and even more so when Jack Hylton and his big band played an arrangement at the composer’s behest, and it demands both the native singers and a feel for the absurd and anarchic that it received in a 1972 Melodiya recording conducted by Gennady Rozhdestvensky, shrewdly licensed by DG.

Listening to Stravinsky’s output across both boxes, the issue of character never goes away. This music isn’t bulletproof. He was right to defend his honour as a composer against bad performances but wrong in the end, I think, to measure them almost exclusively in terms of accuracy. There are very few recordings here of the kind he hated, big and rhythmically slack, such as a New York Symphony in Three Movements under Mehta (Warner). There are rather more scrupulously prepared ones that lack Rozhdestvensky’s feeling for the unique, individual flavour of each work: among them, The Rite under Jansons (Warner), Orpheus and the Octet with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra (DG). Agon is poorly served in both boxes, by Iwaki (Warner) and Ashkenazy (DG), mystifyingly so in the latter case when superbly characterful recordings by Rosbaud and Atherton (Argo, still not even transferred to CD) were available. Some fine solo contributions on both versions of Oedipus (Levine for DG, Welser-Möst for Warner) are compromised by too much static oratorio and not enough immediate drama about both conducting and engineering.

To move beyond exhaustively rehearsed arguments over fidelity to the letter or the spirit of the score, as if one operated against the other, consider the central section of the Scherzo fantastique. Inbal (Warner) conducts it well enough as a bleached imitation of Debussy. Stravinsky wrote it after seeing Parsifal at Bayreuth, and it is as if Boulez (DG) has done nothing more than remind the Cleveland Orchestra that they are playing on a Russian Good Friday meadow (from 3'42"): the effect is transformational, though one recording is no more ‘accurate’ than the other. Gardiner’s casting of The Rake’s Progress (DG) is more ‘Mozartian’ as we understand the term today, but Nagano’s American-accented cast (Warner) feels truer to Stravinsky’s idea of Mozartian style as embedded within the score: bigger-boned, more spicy – more like Szell.

The figure of Boulez looms large in both boxes. It is Stravinsky’s paradoxical misfortune that his music relies so heavily on a breed of musician he affected to despise, yet it finds in Boulez a selectively selfless interpreter. I am especially fond of his picture-book Cleveland Petrushka (DG) and his ‘straight’ but affectionate Pulcinella (Warner); the Four Studies, Le chant du rossignol and Zvezdoliki owe their status as underrated landmarks almost wholly to his advocacy; even in the Ebony Concerto and The Soldier’s Tale he finds answers to questions that other conductors aren’t asking. His Ensemble Intercontemporain recording of the six-minute Concertino (Warner, in its 1952 orchestration) is a bracing discovery for me, rivalled for pungency only by the Alban Berg Quartet’s recording of the 1920 quartet original (also Warner).

In the piano music, I prefer the consistent brilliance (and engineering) of Michel Béroff (Warner) over the mixed pickles assembled by DG, even if Víkingur Ólafsson was drafted in to pick up a couple of shavings from the workbench. Highlights of the choral output on DG include Reinbert de Leeuw leading the Mass, the Cantata and – another revelation – the late Introitus inscribed in memory of TS Eliot; one of a sequence of the dying Stravinsky’s memorials culminating in Oliver Knussen’s definitive accounts on DG of the Huxley Variations and Requiem Canticles.

‘Almost’ complete? Both labels tick off the various versions of The Firebird and Petrushka; only the Warner edition includes the Étude for pianola. DG has licensed from RCA a Boulez recording of the Four Peasant Songs in their 1916 a cappella scoring but left out the 1954 revision with an independent horn-quartet accompaniment which again glances wryly at his Russian heritage. The ‘fidelity’ of Tchaikovskian style in recordings of the Fairy’s Kiss Divertimento by Vandernoot (Warner) and Bychkov (DG) is distinct from but no less appealing than Knussen’s cooler approach to the complete ballet (DG).

In this context it’s a pity that Warner did not license back the Hong Kong PO/Atherton complete Fairy’s Kiss, originally issued on Virgin Classics (4/96) – and even more so that both labels ignore Stravinsky’s chamber orchestrations of movements from Sleeping Beauty, which are hardly less ‘original’ than The Fairy’s Kiss itself or his versions of Chopin and Sibelius. Transcription, orchestration, recomposition – the compilers have put up fences that the composer hardly recognised for himself. More than any composer since Handel, Stravinsky continually challenged notions of originality in composition; I think it was Elliott Carter who admired how he made every note a Stravinsky note.

Two discs of transcriptions fill out the Warner edition, including a brittle Rite, multitracked by Fazıl Say and no match for the wayward fantasy of Argerich and Barenboim on DG, proving that the ‘hoochie-koochie’ style reviled by the composer isn’t entirely foreign to the ballet in its more playful two-piano guise. The Three Movements from Petrushka are elegantly dispatched by Beatrice Rana, almost half a century and an expressive world away from the diamond-cutting Maurizio Pollini on DG; an accordion-duet version of the complete ballet by James Crabb and Geir Draugsvoll lends colouristic authenticity to the score with one hand while stealing its pathos with the other.

In Itzhak Perlman’s mid-’70s album of the Stravinsky/Dushkin arrangements there is a similar sense of the music travelling beyond its borders and speaking a foreign language in grammar learnt from the Romantic violin tradition; on DG, formerly Philips, Isabelle van Keulen and Olli Mustonen are more fluent in this regard but pallid and reserved. The real thing – Stravinsky and Dushkin in person – is tucked away in the unassuming four-disc appendix of ‘historical recordings’ on the Warner edition. This turns out to be quite a gold mine, the most comprehensive single collection I’ve encountered of Stravinsky’s pre-war recordings, all newly remastered by Warner Music France. The transfers are more reliably pitched than the series on Dante/Lys, cleaner and marginally less ‘open’ than EMI’s ‘Composers in Person’ edition where applicable, and only serious Stravinsky collectors familiar with the long-unavailable Andante collections can afford to pass over this Warner edition. A Pulcinella Suite for 78s, a truncated Petrushka, the 1931 Symphony of Psalms also from Paris: all incomparably vivid records of Stravinsky reconstituting the orchestra from the ground up, and of how this music sounded in the mind’s ear of its creator, technically rougher around the edges but drawn with greater flair than the post-war CBS remakes.

Or take Jeu de cartes, a piece initially styled by Stravinsky as his most ‘German’ work and enthusiastically received by audiences across Nazi Germany shortly before he conducted this recording with the Berlin Philharmonic in February 1938. He pronounced himself delighted with the orchestra’s playing – Eugen Jochum had recently led the local premiere – and the Telefunken engineers accommodated it on a deeper, more ambient sound stage than the Columbia recordings he had made to date (without making the mistake of splicing in an extra 37 repeated bars, as Erato did for James Conlon’s Rotterdam recording, still uncorrected on the Warner reissue).

Less controversial as a historical document, more problematic as an aesthetic one, is the pioneering Rite from Paris in 1929. That the composer-conductor lacked the technique or experience of Monteux in the score is there for all to hear, but more importantly so is a sense of its essential character emulated by few recordings since. If the Straram orchestra can’t play the ‘Ritual of Abduction’ together at the composer’s insisted-on metronome mark, or anywhere near all the notes in the ‘Ritual of the Rival Tribes’, it doesn’t matter; or rather it does, because once again the recording presses upon us the question of what fidelity sounds like, in the music of Stravinsky or anyone else. The crude, almost honky-tonk balance of the ‘Ritual Action’, the clumsy scrabbling for position at the opening of the ‘Sacrificial Dance’, the shrill squeals of its denouement, an instant match for the dirty reds and yellows of Roerich’s original designs: this first of all Rites on record is in one sense the most ‘hi-fi’ of all.