In this album two Swiss musicians - the cellist Andreas Graf and pianist Evelyne Grandy - transform what is essentially a song recital into a programme of lyrical miniatures for cello and piano. They thread their own arrangements of melodies by five fellow Swiss composers through some unfamiliar versions of well-known tunes, casting some long-standing favourites in new light and setting them alongside new delicacies.

Classical music in Australia is barely two centuries old, and many of it's riches remain as good as unknown, both at home and abroad. This album of chamber music featuring the horn - itself a largely unfamiliar genre - charts the evolution of Australian music in microcosm, from Romanticism via modernism to a sound suggesting the open space of the outback. This repertoire is as good as unknown at home and further afield, though all of it has personality and presence, and should prove of interest to the international horn-playing community and to audiences more generally.

The Rieger organ recently installed in the Musiikkitalo (Music Center) in Helsinki is the largest modern concert-hall organ in the world. In it's first-ever solo recording Jan Lehtola puts the instrument through it's paces. His unusual programme consists of nine sets of variations on Christmas melodies by four French composers, one Franco-Lebanese and an Englishman using what is probably the only well-known Ukrainian tune. The meeting of old and new in these variations shows off the splendours of the new instrument, the virtuosic writing ranging from gossamer delicacy and sumptuous harmonies to statements of colossal power.

In 1719 the aristocratic Schwarzenberg family inherited the huge castle of Ceský Krumlov in south-western Bohemia, reviving it's distinguished but dormant musical tradition with a new ensemble of two oboes, two cors anglais, two bassoons and two horns, active from 1771 onwards. These musicians soon provided the foundation for a wave of chamber music featuring double-reed woodwind instruments that flourished as the instruments improved. It reached it's peak of popularity in Vienna in the last two decades of the century, but has remained largely unknown since then. This series unites past and present by combining some of the scores researched in the Ceský Krumlov archives (including a 1799 handwritten copy of Beethoven's 1794 C major oboe trio, which suggests it was a Schwarzenberg commission) with works composed more recently - mainly by oboe-playing composers.

Most guitar recitals emphasise the vigorous Spanish and Latin American heritage of the instrument. This album takes a different approach, travelling round the fringes of Europe, with music from Albania, Estonia, France, Serbia, Greece and the British Isles, these largely lyrical works chosen because they were inspired by issues and events that underline the dignity of the human condition. They allude to a surprisingly wide range of subjects: peace-time reconciliation, love and loss, ethnic identity, personal courage, environmental degradation and bittersweet recollections of childhood - in music for calm reflection.

In the days before recorded sound, people usually learned their orchestral music at home, playing it in piaIn the days before recorded sound, people usually learned their orchestral music at home, playing it in piano transcriptions for two or four hands. Two German-Jewish composers took that idea a stage further: Ignaz Moscheles, protege of Beethoven, wrote a symphony for four hands at a single keyboard, and Ferdinand Hiller, friend of Berlioz, Chopin and Liszt, went a step further, following Moscheles' symphony without an orchestra with an opera without singers - both works bold genre-busters well before the term had even been invented. No transcriptions for two or four hands. Two German-Jewish composers took that idea a stage further: Ignaz Moscheles, protege of Beethoven, wrote a symphony for four hands at a single keyboard, and Ferdinand Hiller, friend of Berlioz, Chopin and Liszt, went a step further, following Moscheles' symphony without an orchestra with an opera without singers - both works bold genre-busters well before the term had even been invented.

The music of Douglas Gordon Weiland - born, like Elgar, in Worcestershire, in 1954 - is one of the better-kept secrets of British musical life: very little of his substantial catalogue of orchestral, chamber and choral works has been recorded. This first volume in a projected series reveals a composer with an individual musical language, an angular lyricism informed by echoes of Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Frank Martin, it's quieter moments having something of the autumn elegance of late Brahms and it's more propulsive passages the energy and rough humour of Nielsen and Robert Simpson. Weiland was himself a professional violinist for some years, moreover, and he writes for the instrument with deep understanding.

The Polish composer Moritz Moszkowski (1854-1925) is best remembered for a handful of virtuoso piano pieces, but he also produced a substantial body of orchestral music, most of it unperformed for a century or more. This fourth volume presents his only symphony, a strikingly assured work for a composer in his late teens. Unsurprisingly, it owes a good deal to Schumann in it's dancing rhythms, heraldic bearing and orchestral colours - and the Scherzo might almost be by Mendelssohn on holiday in Poland. The 'Six Episodes' - charming, ingratiating and energising by turn - are all that remain of the lost full-length ballet Laurin. They were saved because Moszkowski excerpted them for concert performance, thereby creating a 'Dance Suite' in all but name.

In 1776, during a spell in Italy early in his career, the Ukrainian composer Dmytro Bortniansky (1751-1825) wrote Creonte, an opera seria based on Sophocles' tragedy Antigone and poised, like early Mozart, on the cusp between Baroque and Classical styles. Although a success in it's day, Creonte then vanished for 250 years, until it was discovered by chance in a Portuguese library. It may have been hidden there because it's tale of love versus power ends with a surprising democratic twist - a daring move in those autocratic times. Since it is the first surviving opera by a Ukrainian composer, it's revival in Kyiv in 2024 became a gesture of defiance, a symbol of national importance underlining the continued vigour of Ukrainian culture even in wartime. This remarkable recording then followed, made in sessions between Russian bombing, black-outs and power cuts - itself a testimony to Ukrainian national resilience.

Between 1972 and 2018 the Ukrainian composer Yevhen Stankovych - born in 1942 and now the senior figure in Ukrainian music - produced a series of seventeen Chamber Symphonies, many of them doubling as concertos. This substantial body of music has remained largely unheard until now, even inside Ukraine, and should prove a major discovery for audiences everywhere. These works cover a kaleidoscopic range of moods - lyrical, rhythmically propulsive, bashfully hesitant, buoyantly assertive, elegiac, optimistic - expressed in a direct language with it's distant roots in the mild modernism of Berg, Britten, Janacek, Shostakovich and like composers. Stankovych's achievement is unparalleled in the history of music not simply because of the sheer number of his Chamber Symphonies - they also contain some of the finest music of the past half-century.

The music of Artur Lemba has been strangely neglected, even in his native Estonia - although during his lifetime (1885-1963) he was held in high regard as pianist and teacher. That oversight is all the more surprising in view of the expansive, passionate lyricism of his writing - listeners who enjoy the music of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov are likely to warm to Lemba's full-blooded Romantic style. This second release in a pioneering series discovering his chamber music reveals three expansive, big-hearted works full of personality.

David Hackbridge Johnson, born near London in 1963, is an all-round musician - not only a prolific composer but also a conductor, violinist, singer, pianist, jazz drummer and poet. Both works in this album, recorded under the baton of the composer, have extra-musical stimuli. The Piano Concerto evokes the Kafkaesque fantasy world and tragic fate of the Polish-Jewish writer and artist Bruno Schulz, a victim of Nazi oppression - and it also marks the early death of another uniquely gifted individual, since it was written for Jonathan Powell, whose last recording it became. The Symphony, taking it's lead from earlier composers like Bax, Britten and Vaughan Williams, is a response to the English landscape, as seen through the paintings of a number of artists whose work Hackbridge Johnson esteems - it's colours and moods changing as kaleidoscopically as nature itself.

The Viennese-born Carl Czerny (1791-1857) is best remembered for his countless pedagogical studies, hundreds and hundreds of them. But his astonishing fecundity - his opus numbers go up to 861, and there is much more music than that - has obscured the fact that he was an important composer in his own right, his works forming a link between Beethoven (his teacher) and Liszt (his student), between the Classical and Romantic eras. The four pieces recorded here - two for two pianos and two for piano four-hands - were intended to impress the salons of Biedermeier Vienna. The titles of three of them contain the word 'brillant': Czerny's intention was to dazzle and entertain, and that's just what this sparkling music does.

The composer and pianist Livia Teodorescu-Ciocanea, born in Galati, eastern Romania, in 1959, brings together ancient and modern in her music: echoes of the modal sounds of Romanian folk music blend with an openness to timbre to generate a palette of colours that is both contemporary and ageless. All three works here use the voice - solo and in chorus - to touch on aspects of the human condition, suggesting both drama and ritual.

With this volume, Dobromir Tsenov completes his survey of the solo piano music of his compatriot Lubomir Pipkov (1904-74), one of the leading members of the 'second generation' of Bulgarian composers who helped establish a national tradition of classical music, blending western forms with the rhythms of local folksong and folk-dances. The first complete recording of the piano music of his father, Panayot Pipkov (1871-1942), one of the 'first generation', sets it in context, in it's mix of folk roots and Lisztian bravura.

Myron Silberstein, Brooklyn-born (in 1974) and a long-term resident of Chicago, belongs to that centuries-old tradition of the composer-pianist. But here the distant roots are not so much in Mozart and Beethoven as in Copland and Barber. Silberstein's language echoes the tradition of earlier American composers like Creston, Mennin, and Persichetti, and his tonal harmony may remind some listeners of mid-twentieth-century jazz, especially in it's sense of improvisatory freedom. Like much of American culture more generally, it is open, outgoing, and often positive in spirit.

The Swedish composer Moses Pergament (1893-1977) - Finnish-born of Lithuanian-Jewish stock - chose the poems he set to music from a wide range of sources: those heard in this first-ever recording of his songs are mostly in Swedish but also in a variety of other languages. They likewise cover the gamut of human emotion, from buoyant folksongs and children's verses via lyrical expressions of love and loss to stark meditations on suffering and death. Many of Pergament's poets evoke the natural world in their expression of emotion, but his music never yields to sentimentality: he treats each song as a microcosm, expressed with drama and dignity. Time was when Pergament's songs were performed by singers of the calibre of Birgit Nilsson, Elisabeth Söderström and Nicolai Gedda; it is high time they were rediscovered.

The Hamburg-born Ferdinand Thieriot (1838-1919) not only shared a teacher - Eduard Marxsen - with Brahms; both composers, who remained friends in later years, use a very similar musical language, one which is richly melodic and effortlessly contrapuntal. The musicologist Wilhelm Altmann wrote that 'Thieriot's chamber music is without exception noble and pure. He writes with perfect command of form and expression' - as the works on this fourth Toccata Classics volume prove, in their exquisite balance of depth and beauty, of Brahmsian richness and Schubertian spontaneity.

Toivo Kuula (1883-1918) is one of the many composers who died at a tragically young age - 34 in his case: he was hit by a bullet fired after a brawl at a victory celebration at the end of the Finnish Civil War. The immediacy of the music he wrote during his short life points to the immensity of the loss not only to Finnish culture but to music more generally - as this second album of two, presenting his entire output of songs for solo voice and piano, makes abundantly clear. The range of moods captured here is striking; the most passionate of these songs generate an operatic intensity in their short span, in a style that balances directness of expression and rich late-Romantic harmonies.

David Matthews and Peter Sheppard Skaerved have been collaborating on a series of works for violin and viola for many years now, with Matthews setting Sheppard Skaerved formidable technical challenges, and Sheppard Skaerved surprising Matthews by finding a way to overcome the difficulties in his path. Behind all the pyrotechnics, this partnership is generating one of the largest, and most musically rewarding, body of compositions for violin and viola by any living composer. Many of Matthews' pieces record his experience of nature or offer tributes to friends, with the works heard in this third volume also tracing a journey from darkness to light.