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.

From the early days of the twentieth century until the Anschluss forced him into American exile, Richard Stohr (1874-1967) was one of the more prominent personalities in Viennese musical life, as composer, teacher and author. Earlier releases in this series of recordings revealed him to have an individual voice, somewhere between Bruckner, Mahler, Korngold and Strauss. It can be heard in it's full glory in his Chamber Symphony of 1912, a sunlit score modest in it's orchestral demands but expansive in it's ambit and generous in it's ceaseless flow of gorgeous melody.

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.

The first album of Postcards from Ukraine gave a potted history of Ukrainian music in the form of a series of miniatures for piano and violin. In this second instalment four representative chamber works demonstrate how quickly Ukrainian music developed a proud and independent tradition - although all four composers here were bullied by the authoritarian regime to the north. One of them, Vasil Barvinsky, even spent ten years in the Gulag, during which time the Soviets destroyed his manuscripts. Upon his release, unbowed, he set about reconstructing those lost scores, though he died before he could complete the task. His glorious A minor Piano Trio gives an indication of what was nearly lost - and how much remains to be discovered.

Concertos for bass clarinet are rare enough; this album brings three new ones to swell those limited ranks. It presents the fruit of a series of interlocking international co-operations, between orchestras in Sweden, the UK and USA, with American, British and Swedish composers and, at the heart of the undertaking, the bass clarinettist of the Malmo Symphony Orchestra, Carl-Johan Stjernstrom. All three composers exploit the huge range of colours the bass clarinet can offer, in music that ranges from the fierce and dramatic to the sunny and easy-going. The album also inaugurates a Toccata Next series providing a platform for the musicians of the Malmo Symphony Orchestra.

The two composers heard on this album, Giovanni Gabrieli (1553-1612) and Giovanni Bonato (born in 1961) have more in common than their first names: both hail from the Veneto in north-east Italy - there is no documentation of Gabrieli's birth, but he was probably Venetian, and Bonato was born in nearby Schio. Their music, too, is conceived in terms of it's sound in space, with Gabrieli using the cori spezzati that sang from the opposing galleries of St Mark's Basilica in Venice, and Bonato employing cori spazzializati to build a spatial dimension into the music itself. Juxtaposed, their styles offer a striking contrast, with Gabrieli's bold declamations set against Bonato's shifting, timeless suspensions.

This anthology of unknown American violin sonatas - the first of a series - reveals music of astonishing craftsmanship and energy. All three composers - Henry Holden Huss, Henry Schoenefeld and Rossetter Gleason Cole, born less than ten years apart - went to Germany to study before returning to enrich American musical life at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The sheer confidence of their writing in these sonatas, for both violin and piano, in a bold Brahmsian style indicates how much more fine music still has to be discovered, in the output of these three men and from their 'lost generation' of American composers more generally.

Charles Harford Lloyd (1849-1919) - organist of Gloucester Cathedral and the Chapel Royal, Oxford theologian and concert-organiser, music master at Eton and much more - was one of the most distinguished musicians of Victorian England. The largest part of his output is vocal music, mostly for the church; he composed only a handful of chamber works, often involving the clarinet. He wrote in a light Romantic idiom, where the influence of Brahms is often audible, as with his close friend, Hubert Parry. Lloyd knew how to make the clarinet sing, with one lovely, long-limbed melody after another. This first-ever album of his chamber music rescues a long-forgotten figure from the shadows.

Over the past century or so, composers have tended to see themselves as either traditionalists or modernists. The music of Joel Feigin (born in New York in 1951) bridges both worlds, combining the resources of tonality and atonality with equal relish, naturally extending the styles of the recent past. It's freewheeling energy is often tempered by an elegant restraint, sometimes revealing the warm, humanist impulse behind his sound-world. This first volume of his piano and chamber music follows a lusty piano trio and a moving tribute to a much-missed teacher with four sets of variations, three by Feigin and one an arrangement of Bach, the composer who Feigin says is the root of all his music.

The music of the Yorkshire-born Arnold Cooke (1906-2005) - inventively contrapuntal, lyrical and energetic in turns - does not deserve the neglect it suffered even in it's composer's lifetime. This second album of two presenting all five of Cooke's string quartets underlines his reputation for resourceful craftsmanship, presented in a style which sits downstream from Hindemith, with whom he studied in Berlin, and from Bartok. There is also a surprisingly strong dance element in all three works heard here, though tempered, even in their lighter moments, by something of the emotional reticence of Britten's quartets.

Whether in his original home of Vienna, as a conservatoire director in Mainz, or as an emigre in Edinburgh, where he became one of the mainstays of musical life, Hans Gal (1890-1987) championed choral singing as a way of directly involving people in making music: he founded and conducted a number of choirs and provided an extensive output of choral compositions. This third album of his choral music offers a vivid cross-section of music for chamber choir, featuring mixed voices, women's voices and male-voice choir, a cappella, with solo soprano, with piano and with chamber accompaniment.

When Germany invaded Austria in 1938, Robert Furstenthal, born in 1920, took the path of many Viennese Jews and fled to the United States, where he made his living as an accountant; the fact that he had written music in his youth was soon forgotten. Reconnection, after 35 years, with the woman who had been his first love rekindled both that flame and his urge to compose, and from then on songs and chamber music flowed from his pen, preserving the spirit of fin-de-siecle Vienna under the Californian sun - 'When I compose, I am back in Vienna', he explained. He died in November 2016, aged 96, knowing that his lyrical, eloquent music was at last attracting the attention of both musicians and microphones. [Volumes 1-3: TOCC 0519, 0542, 0577]

The Welshman John Thomas (1826-1913), harpist to Queen Victoria, wrote prolifically for his own instrument, both for solo harp and for duos of two harps or harp and piano - a combination where the different sounds of the two instruments enhance the clarity of the texture. Thomas' original works use the elegant Romantic style of his own day, but he often drew on Welsh folksong for his inspiration and left a generous legacy of transcriptions, especially of operatic favourites. Although some of his music was intended for the Victorian drawing room, other pieces require a virtuoso technique - and all of it has a thoroughly engaging melodic appeal.�[Volumes 1-5: TOCC 0561, 0566, 0578, 0582, 0711]

The organ works of Axel Ruoff, born in Stuttgart in 1957, constitute one of the most important contributions to the literature for the instrument by any composer since Messiaen. Stylistically, his music unites the French cathedral tradition of composers like Langlais, Dupre and Guillou with the concern with counterpoint and logic heard in Reger and later German figures. Ruoff uses the unparalleled resources of the modern symphonic organ not produce music of freewheeling energy and uncompromising power. (Volumes 1-5, TOCC 0567, 0596, 0610, 0672, 0709)