It is now well over two decades since British label Chandos commenced its attempt at a complete recorded edition of Grainger's music. Given Grainger's habit of arranging the same work for many different ensembles, as well as his predilection for ‘elastic scoring’ within those arrangements, let alone the economic challenges that have born down on the classical music recording industry in the meantime, it is remarkable that Chandos has come as close as it has to completing this task.

Now budget label Naxos Recordings has made its own major contribution to the endeavour by releasing a three-CD collection of Grainger's complete music for Concert Band, all performed by the Royal Norwegian Navy Band under the baton of Bjarte Engeset. Founded in 1820, this professional band is based in Horten, south of Oslo, and has a core ensemble of 29 wind and brass players. It can claim for itself three world premiere recordings on these CDs: Grainger's arrangements for concert band of music by William Lawes and Herman Sandby, and a concert band version of Grainger's arrangement of the Faeroe Island folksong ‘Let's Dance Gay in Green Meadows’.

All the performances across three full-length CDs are, I am pleased to say, unfailingly excellent. The band's intonation and tonal blend is consistent across and within individual instrumental sections, and the recordings themselves are beautifully balanced and engineered to convey a sense of both acoustic intimacy and depth.

Grainger had been drawn to the concert band precisely because of its potential to offer such a well-blended sound palette. This in turn had been facilitated by the development of extended families of wind and percussion instruments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The concert band ensemble could now achieve a level of tonal balance that hitherto had been considered the preserve of the string section of a symphony orchestra (which for Grainger was a more imperfect medium by comparison). This encouraged him in particular to undertake arrangements not only of his beloved folk songs but also of works by J.S. and C.P.E. Bach, Josquin des Prez, Guillaume de Machaut, John Jenkins and John Dowland, alongside music of his own and that of some favoured contemporaries. As he wrote in 1932,

Grainger always does more, however, than merely transcribe such music from an alternative or obsolete musical medium. There is no attempt to produce through his orchestration some kind of ethnographic study of folk song style, or – in the case of early music – what we would now call ‘historically informed’ performance practice. Rather, he seeks to draw out of such music aspects of its character that he believed resonated with more contemporary aesthetic concerns. In particular, he believed we needed to find new ways of expressing sentimental longing and, in so doing, confront ‘the painfulness of human life’, no less. This is reflected, above all, in Grainger's foregrounding of expressive, contrapuntally driven harmony (what he called ‘heart-throb-some chord-music’) across all his band arrangements.

Particular prominence is also given to contrapuntal lines in the lower registers, as is evident in Engeset's performance of the later of the two arrangements Grainger made of the County Derry Air (Irish Tune from County Derry) for concert band. This much less familiar version, which dates from 1918, has the famous melody almost overrun by secondary melodic lines derived from the intensely chromatic harmony that Grainger weaves around it. In his liner notes Engeset claims that an almost ‘totally different piece’ emerges, but I rather prefer to think that Grainger is offering us a kind of musical ‘haunting’ of the famous tune he had himself done so much to popularize. This is musical nostalgia at its most bittersweet.

Something of the same effect (and affect) can also be heard in perhaps Grainger's best-known, and (according to his biographer John Bird) best-regarded, work for wind band, ‘Lincolnshire Posy’. Here Grainger's evocations of rural English folk song and the singers who sang them to him have a similarly poignant edge. Grainger's own programme note in fact describes how ‘Lincolnshire Posy’ was composed ‘in a mood of considerable bitterness – bitterness at memories of the cruel treatment meted out to folksingers as human beings’. The Royal Norwegian Navy Band's performance of it is appropriately vigorous and full-blooded, and all the more moving because of it.

The medium of the concert band also appealed to Grainger because of what he considered to be its egalitarian character. Long before Christopher Small proposed that we consider music to be a verb not a noun – an activity not a thing – Grainger had recognized the significance of the inescapably social nature of music-making. But one of the larger historical narratives that accompanied the arc of Grainger's life (1882–1961) was the decline in participatory musical culture across the Western world. Shared musical experiences were becoming more and more beholden to new sound reproduction technologies such as the gramophone, radio and motion picture soundtrack. The concert band, however, was one medium that appeared to be surviving, and it was doing so in communities (such as those in the north of England or in rural America) that might not otherwise have had access to, let alone had the capacity to play in, a symphony orchestra. The concert band's particular heightened ability to convey contrapuntal textures thus becomes positively associated in Grainger's mind with what he believed was music's broader potential as a ‘gregarious’ art form.

Whether or not we would still recognize the validity of Grainger's claims for the social significance of the concert band or agree with his associated complaint that it ‘seems almost incomprehensible that the leading composers of our era do not write as extensively for it as the do for the symphony orchestra’, these recordings nevertheless demonstrate that his compositions for it stand on their own merits as a significant creative achievement. The Royal Norwegian Navy Band have thus made an important contribution to the recorded repertoire of band music for concert band and make as good a promotion for both this significant aspect of Grainger's musical personality and the significance of the medium itself as any aficionado of either could wish for.