Percy Aldridge Grainger (1882-1961) was an ambiguous presence in Australian music, both as a man and a composer. A sensational concert pianist in his youth (though not one to take other composers’ score markings too seriously), he befriended Grieg and Delius, and achieved considerable success in America (eventually he took US citizenship). Post-World War II he became the forgotten figure described by Barry Humphries in his memoirs: shuffling around Melbourne, struggling to maintain a Grainger museum that housed his manuscripts, home-made “music machines” and a large collection of whips and sex toys.

Grainger saw himself as the future of Australian music. Certainly, he wrote a great number of musical arrangements, or ‘rambles’ as he called them (such an English word!). Most of the 61 tracks on these discs are arrangements of British folksongs, like Shepherd’s Hey, My Robin is to the Greenwood Gone, and famously English Country Gardens. They recall a world of Empire Day, folk dancing, and bland radio programmes for schools that was in its death throes when I was a kid. Imaginatively written for the piano though Grainger’s arrangements are, and as lovingly performed as they are here by Australian pianist Leslie Howard, those associations render them...