George Edward Perry, businessman: born Derby 15 May 1931; managing director, Hyperion Records 1980-2003; MBE 1999; married 1959 Doreen Davies (one son, two daughters; marriage dissolved 1991); died London 9 February 2003.

In 1980 Ted Perry founded the classical music label Hyperion Records. The current Hyperion catalogue runs to over 250 pages and, as the outcome of one man's vision, it represents an enormous achievement.

His first record was Dame Thea King's performance of the Finzi and Stanford Clarinet Concertos, soon followed by her award-winning recording of the Mozart Concerto and Quintet. But Perry had the problem of all newly founded independent record companies: lack of capital, the high cost of orchestral recordings, establishing himself in the market and slow returns while building a catalogue. In the early days he financed his label by driving a minicab at night; he recalled that the weekends were the most financially rewarding part of the week.

Gothic Voices' pioneering 1981 recording of the 12th-century abbess Hildegard of Bingen, to which Hyperion gave the title A Feather on the Breath of God, was an unexpected success, over the years selling approaching 350,000 copies. This capitalised Hyperion for years. Perry would remark about new projects, "Oh, don't worry, St Hildegard of Hyperion will pay for it." Effectively, it allowed him to make a few mistakes.

The director of Gothic Voices, Christopher Page, had sent Perry a cassette of a Radio 3 broadcast of Hildegard. Perry, having already heard the broadcast in his minicab, accepted the idea, and Hildegard was done in one long day at St Jude-on-the-Hill in Hampstead, London, featuring a then unknown singer, Emma Kirkby. The session was made all the more personal by Ted's wife, Doreen, bringing a huge picnic for the performers. At the time Hildegard was known only to a few scholars, and the recording's successful championing of it was a significant straw in the wind of what would follow. Page remembers that, although eventually he made 23 records for Hyperion, he never had a contract, remarking that "you could always phone Ted and get a straight answer".

Ted Perry had a special feel for singers and also evolved a marketing strategy of developing series, sometimes of the most unlikely material, ranging from Vivaldi and Purcell to the music of Robert Simpson. Probably the most remarkable of these was Graham Johnson's epic survey of Schubert's songs, launched in 1987, and finally completed in 37 volumes. Perry's belief in the highest production values, with booklets which were allowed to find their own length (one was a monograph of 37,000 words), was a significant contributor to the series' success; it won two Gramophone and numerous other industry awards.

Here Perry's feeling for voices and for casting really came into its own, and, having been involved in his younger days in the beginning of Janet Baker's recording career, he was proud to be able to launch the Schubert series with one of her last recordings. Later, he managed to record future big names such as Christine Schäfer, Ian Bostridge and Matthias Goerne, and win international awards with them before they became more widely known. The choice of singers across the series is a remarkable portrait of the art of singing at the end of the 20th century.

In repertoire, too, Hyperion's championship of unknown music has varied from The Romantic Piano Concerto series, masterminded by Mike Spring and still ongoing after 31 volumes, to Leslie Howard's 95-disc traversal of the complete Liszt piano music. Peter Holman's The English Orpheus, a remarkable series of 47 discs with the Parley of Instruments, gave voice to English music from the late 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries. This was totally unexplored repertoire, which prospered owing to the high quality of both music and performances. The Hyperion list of award-winning pianists includes Tatyana Nikolaieva, Angela Hewitt, Marc-André Hamelin and Stephen Hough.

Totally different was the series of Sir Granville Bantock's orchestral music, which prompted a critical re-evaluation of Bantock as a composer. Before the fourth of these, which was devoted to Bantock's Sappho Songs, Perry asked me to advise what he should record. I suggested Sappho, but he was not keen, until he was persuaded to attend Stephen Banfield's revival of the cycle at Birmingham University. This was nothing short of Perry's road to Damascus. He came out converted: "I'm going to do it," he announced enthusiastically, and within a few months sessions were under way, Perry playing his masterstroke by casting the mezzo-soprano Susan Bickley as the soloist. Sales of over 9,000 copies for such little-known music were remarkable.

Ted Perry was a records man through and through, and was always excited by the new, even to the extent of personally unpacking newly delivered CDs. Like all self-made men he could be difficult, but he inspired huge loyalties in his associates. He believed in the record industry as something much more than a business to make money, and he demanded quality. If a project made artistic sense he would back it, an approach which paid off for, as well as a host of other awards, in 22 years Hyperion won 24 Gramophone Awards including three Records of the Year.

George Edward Perry was born in Derby in 1931 and was at first apprenticed to be a printer, a background that influenced his entire career in the record industry, giving him a lifelong sympathy for typography. A childhood illness left him with a limp only relieved by a hip- replacement operation long after the foundation of Hyperion. He inevitably countered any enquiries about his health by saying, "I always feel like Bernard Shaw – never ask how someone is, they might just tell you."

Without formal qualifications, he had a succession of jobs in the record industry. He arrived in London in 1949 and worked in the EMG record shop, gradually acquiring a collector's knowledge of recordings and music. Eventually he moved on to the newly founded Heliodor label in 1956 but, feeling his career was not developing, the following year he went to Australia, where he worked for Festival Records, which not only recorded new repertoire but also distributed British records in Australia.

Returning to London in 1961, he worked for one of the first independent labels, Saga, in an industry then dominated by the big names, and for them made very early recordings of Janet Baker and John Shirley Quirk in then unrecorded music. His repertoire also included one of the first widely disseminated recordings of the Bartók String Quartets, by the Fine Arts Quartet. Thus he developed the two principal strands of his later success: being able to spot talented artists early, and having a vision of repertoire needing development, which he recorded on gut instinct without any clear evidence of whether it would be financially successful.

From 1963, unhappy with the record industry, he took a succession of casual jobs, including driving an ice-cream van. Returning to records nine years later, he worked for Saga again and then jointly founded the Meridian label with the recording engineer John Shuttleworth, making the first recording by an independent to win a Gramophone Award.

Perry was by then nearing 50, and it pointed him towards achieving his lifetime's ambition by starting his own label, Hyperion. He had acquired that instinctive lifetime's experience of his customers which gave him an unchallenged feel for his market. He was not a man for flashy offices or expensive publicity launches, though, as all who attended the Hyperion 20th anniversary party in 2000 will remember, when it came to it, Ted knew all too well how to push the boat out.

He was an impulsive person and would always back his hunch. Robert King, later to make many superb recordings with the King's Consort for Hyperion, remembers first sending Perry four tentative ideas for recordings. Early the next morning Perry telephoned to say, "Hi Robert, Ted here – we'll take them all. When are you going to record them?"

The pianist Angela Hewitt says, "Ted was unique in the record business, he made Hyperion feel like a big family – one to which you were so happy to belong."

Lewis Foreman