Bliss was born in Barnes in 1891 to an American father and an English mother, who died when he was four. His upbringing was that of the English well-to-do: Rugby and Cambridge, and then the Royal College of Music, where his studies were interrupted by the war. One of the great revelations of these discs of his piano works is that they show both his early maturity as a composer and the influence on him not just of his teachers at the RCM (who included Vaughan Williams) but of some of his contemporaries, too, notably Herbert Howells. Bliss was coy about his juvenilia and indeed hardly mentioned it in his autobiography. As a result, several of these piano works had never been recorded before.

The pre-war music, notably his Suite for Piano of 1912 – written while he was still at Cambridge and before the RCM shaped him – sounds as it might have had Bliss been studying in Belle Époque Paris or Vienna. That was still the mainstream of musical ideas in Britain before the Great War (never forget that Vaughan Williams himself went to Paris in 1908 to take lessons from Ravel, to acquire what he called “a little French polish”) and Bliss was plainly immersed in it. Another pre-War, and pre-RCM, work is his Valses Fantastiques, which critics have speculated was inspired by Ravel; however interesting it is, it has none of the Frenchman’s depth, nor his willingness to go off in experimental directions. For Bliss, that would come later. Nonetheless, these early compositions drip with promise.

At the RCM, Bliss started to develop a more radical idea of composition. Although he remained far behind the developments in European writing immediately before the war, as displayed by Ravel, or Stravinsky, he was finding his own voice. Inevitably, that voice only became apparent after the war. Bliss had an arduous conflict: he was an officer in the Grenadier Guards, sufficiently brave to be mentioned in dispatches, but wounded twice and gassed and, worst of all, bereaved when his beloved brother Kennard was killed on the Somme. It was not until his Morning Heroes of 1930 that he got all that out of his system.

In the immediate post-war period came impressive works, notably his four-part Masks from 1924, and another Suite for Piano of the following year. The Suite is one of the peaks of Bliss’s piano writing. In four movements, it shows an unbridled originality and invention, and that Bliss had finally settled on how he wanted to use the piano – it is a work that manifestly demands serious skill on the part of the pianist, and on the Somm recording Bebbington is more than equal to it.

Bliss was by then susceptible to the influence of jazz – music that other composers of his generation, such as Foulds and Moeran, willingly embraced, but which his teacher Vaughan Williams allowed himself to be influenced by (such as in his Piano Concerto of 1930) with a reluctance bordering on distaste. The odour of jazz lingers around the Suite, but is even more apparent in two short works: The Rout Trot of 1927 and the eponymous Bliss: One Step of 1923.

There are some later works, perhaps most impressive of all his Triptych of 1969, and these show the composer’s reflectiveness, and his increasing determination to conform to no one but himself. For those familiar with his orchestral writing, this piano music is alarmingly helpful in exposing the foundations of Bliss’s art; otherwise it is the perfect way in to the music of a composer long overdue reappraisal.