Rejoice that Hyperion's impeccable back catalogue is finally available to stream

At the beginning of the 1980s a former ice-cream salesman called Ted Perry drove a London minicab to raise money for his dream project: the world’s most smartly curated classical record label.

For the first time these magnificent recordings are arriving on Spotify, Apple Music and other platforms

He called it Hyperion, after the Greek sun god, and by the time he died in 2003 it had acquired its own mythology. The Hyperion catalogue contained all of Schubert’s songs, sung by legendary artists accompanied by the scholar-pianist Graham Johnson; all Bach’s organ music, played with bouncy precision by Christopher Herrick; the complete sacred music of Monteverdi, Purcell and Vivaldi, directed by Robert King; and Leslie Howard’s consistently fine 99-CD survey of the complete Liszt piano music.

Under Ted’s son Simon Perry, Hyperion rose even higher in the firmament. Stephen Hough gave us a whole shelf of reference recordings that included the Rachmaninov piano concertos, Brahms’s late pieces and the Chopin Nocturnes.