The compositional career of Robin Stevens, Welsh-born (in 1958), and Manchester-based, is divided into two periods, separated by a period of illness. The first mainly produced chamber music and works for the church that employed him; restored to health, he found an appetite for larger forms, writing three substantial concertos and a number of other orchestral works - all now recorded for Toccata Classics. This first album sets his expansive Bassoon Concerto, amid three shorter works, each of them revealing how his command of orchestral colour and melodic line can suggest landscapes and narratives. In the slow movement of the Concerto in particular, there are passages of deep feeling and intensity, but Stevens also has a healthy sense of fun, which often emerges unexpectedly to energise his music.

The largest part of the output of the Hamburg-born composer and writer Walter Niemann (1876-1953), a student of both Humperdinck and Reinecke, is piano music: an astonishing 1,000 or so pieces, divided into 189 opus numbers. Most of them are lyrical miniatures in a warm and approachable late-Romantic style, some evoking the music of the past - often with a touching degree of dignity and restraint, but also with an occasional flash of good humour. The range of moods here is surprisingly wide, from pieces recalling late Brahms, and a barcarolle evoking Offenbach, via light-hearted character-sketches, and evocative picture-postcards, to a warm-hearted and tender piano sonata.

Spanish Renaissance polyphony has a reputation for florid, intricate contrapuntal textures and dark colours. Sebasti�n de Vivanco (c. 1551-1622), born in �vila but active for most of his life in Salamanca, stands apart from his contemporaries: his music explores a much wider range of colours and techniques than that of, say, Victoria. In his more experimental and dramatic motets, some of which are heard here, he points the way towards the new Baroque. But, in the calm sobriety of his Requiem, now reconstructed and recorded for the first time, he honours the Iberian tradition of unhurried chant-driven polyphony, all the more moving for it's uncluttered clarity and exquisitely lovely chordal sequences.

This fifth volume of the orchestral works of the late-Romantic Swiss composer Richard Flury (1896-1967) brings two works deeply bound up with his native Solothurn, in the north-west of the country. His Fastnachts-Sinfonie, or 'Carnival Symphony', is an expansive symphonic poem predicated on local legend and folk tradition, embracing both frolic and feeling. The Third Symphony - in which one can hear traces of Bruckner, and Richard Strauss - celebrates the rolling hills and endless skies of the Bucheggberg, where he loved to go walking, and where, the freewheeling music would suggest, his heart found freedom.

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.