The Second Symphony of the Swiss composer Richard Flury (1896-1967) is deeply bound up with his personal life. In 1932 his first marriage broke up, and his wife and four children left Solothurn in the north to settle in Ticino, in the south. Through visits to his family in Lugano Flury grew to know the area well, so much so that he decided to celebrate their new surroundings in his Second Symphony, the movements of which are based on the carillon of the Flury family's local church and three Ticino folksongs. Structurally, the work belongs to the Brucknerian tradition, but it also has points of contact with the orchestral nature-painting of Flury's good friend Joseph Marx. The landscape of the Poeme nocturne is an interior one: it is an expansive dream-fantasy of occasionally violent passions, a worthy cousin of Richard Strauss' tone-poems.

The Choir of Girton College, Cambridge, continues it's pioneering exploration of the music of the Italian Renaissance master Marc'Antonio Ingegneri (c. 1535/36-92) with a journey through the liturgical year, as mirrored in Ingegneri's motets. A 'concept album' of Renaissance polyphony may be an unusual undertaking, but this one illustrates how Ingegneri took his lead from the emotions implicit in each major celebration of the church - from sorrow and awe to joy and jubilation - expressed in music of extraordinary beauty, belying the internal complexity that gives it it's emotional power.

The English composer John Gardner (1917-2011) played the organ from an early age; his first work to be published was for the organ, and he wrote for the instrument throughout his long life. His music, whether secular or sacred, is characterised by a rhythmic vivacity and technical command informed by his fondness for jazz, Renaissance and Baroque procedures and classical counterpoint - and the spirit of dance is often close to hand. It's quirky and distinctive personality is a mirror of the man: Gardner's gruff, slightly formal manner barely hid a mischievous sense of humour, flashes of which can be glimpsed even in his more serious works. Above all, his musical language is honest and emotionally direct, as he was.

In the 1930s, as Gunter Raphael (1903-60) found doors closing in his native Germany - he was half-Jewish - he was accorded a warm reception in Finland, where his music was heard in a series of broadcast concerts. There was a family connection, too: Raphael's grandfather had taught Sibelius in Berlin. Raphael acknowledged his welcome by incorporating Finnish material into his music, and his Op. 41 is a monumental organ triptych based on Finnish chorales, with two towering contrapuntal edifices either side of a Baroque suite.

Naresh Sohal, born in Punjab in 1939 but resident in the UK for most of his life, was the first person of Indian origin to make his mark as a composer of western classical music, writing works that displayed an unusual fusion of two cultures. The four quartets heard here - two of them being performed for the first time - document Sohal's stylistic journey: the fireworks of Chiaroscuro II reflect the wild energy of European modernism, whereas the three later works are more considered in manner, incorporating occasional echoes of Indian music into their freewheeling counterpoint.

Werner Heinrich Schmitt, born in Mannheim in 1961, began to study the piano in boyhood, and soon started to compose as well. Since then he has earned his living as a pianist, writing music as time permitted. This first album of his works reveals a composer of considerable substance, particularly in the two moving song-cycles that book-end this album. The sensitivity and resourcefulness of Schmitt's aural imagination are confirmed in the chamber and piano pieces heard here. Some are infused with joy, others with sorrow, but they all speak a musical language that aims to speak to the listener directly.

Folk-music has been a resource for classical composers since the beginning of the western tradition. The violin has it's own folk heritage, of course, but since you can't lug a piano from village to village, composers for that instrument have had to dig into their own musical roots to generate a folk-based keyboard repertoire, usually with refreshing results. This recital takes the listener on a journey that spans three continents, east to west, marrying the resources of the modern concert grand with the immediacy of the folk originals.

For the past two centuries or so, making music has largely been a public business, with paying audiences listening to professional musicians. But for most of western history, outside of formal and religious occasions and local festivities, music-making was largely a domestic affair, with individuals playing for their own pleasure. Most of the music written for the drawing room has long been lost from sight, and it's composers forgotten, the two heard here - the Austrian Cajetan Wutky and German-English John Henry (n� Justus Heinrich) Griesbach - being cases in point. Their Haydnesque string duos, only recently rescued from obscurity in modern publications, hint at the pleasure their first patrons would have found in performing them.

Arnold Rosner (1945-2013) was a New Yorker through and through, but his musical language reached across time and cultures, clothing the modal harmony and rhythm of pre-Baroque polyphony in rich Romantic colours, thus producing a style that is instantly recognisable and immediately appealing. Having written his Eighth Symphony for symphonic wind band, he took a liking to the idiom, composing seven more works for this archetypical formation of American university life, none of them recorded before now. Their inspiration is eclectic - they range from descriptive tone-poems via the recreation of an Indian raga and other folk-based pieces to more formal structures - but Rosner's unerring balance of dignity and energy is common to all of them and stamps them with a sound that is uniquely his.

It is remarkable not only that the London-based Noah Max (b. 1998) should have composed four string quartets by his mid-twenties; their stylistic range is also surprisingly wide. No. 1, which sets Jean Giono's story 'The Man who Planted Trees', narrated here by Sir Michael Morpurgo, has distant roots in English pastoralism, but the refracted lines, furtive colours and ecstatic textures of Nos. 2 and 3 are much closer to European modernism, with echoes of Kurtag and Ligeti. No. 4 is a wild ride, it's manic, swirling rhythms interrupted by passages of whispered intimacy that eventually draw it into silence.

The composer Peter Gast (1854-1918) - real name Heinrich Koselitz - is best remembered as a friend and posthumous editor of Friedrich Nietzsche rather than for his own music, which was kept under lock and key in communist East Germany for half a century; only recently has it begun to be performed and recorded. 'Il faut mediterraniser la musique', Nietzsche argued, and Gast's Lieder, in a reaction against Wagnerian gloom, do just that, singing of love, life, springtime, drinking and youthful ardour; even the more wistful songs have a spring in their step.

The enormously prolific Marie Joseph Erb (1858-1944) has somehow escaped the attention of posterity, although the quality of his music is on a par with contemporary organist-composers whose works are far better known. Erb's long life - he saw Berlioz conduct in 1863 and was still composing 80 years later - was focused on Strasbourg, where he was active as pianist, organist and professor, though he had studied in Paris, with Faure, Gigout, Saint-Saens and Widor, and later with Liszt in Weimar. This second Jan Lehtola/Toccata Classics album devoted to his organ music sandwiches six short pieces intended for liturgical use between two monumental works; indeed, in it's combination of architectural magnificence and emotional intensity, the Sonata on Chorale Themes of the Catholic Liturgy may be one of the finest of all organ sonatas.

The music of the Bulgarian composer-conductor Emil Tabakov (b. 1947) explores the darker side of the human spirit in epic scores as austere as they are powerful. His mighty Fifth Symphony, a work almost an hour in length, is obsessive and violent, with the two outer movements, wild kaleidoscopes of whirling colors and driving energy, framing a tragic slow movement and a sardonic march. The much earlier Double-Bass Concerto, which sits downstream from Shostakovich, shows the same grim sense of humor in the teeth of the dancing indifference of fate. A critic once wrote of Tabakov's music: "In his concert music as well as in his symphonies, Emil Tabakov insists on selection and dynamics, on the large-scale development of a small in volume, but focused, thematic material. Tabakov's music is the music of movement, it rarely carries us into spaces of contemplation or frozen calm; it's movement forward in time is determined by the composer's magnificent technique with which he works the material, turning it into music and theses and antitheses, of culminations and lows."

The German-born, Vienna-based Hermann Gradener (1844-1929) is yet another composer whose music, esteemed in it's own time, has since slipped between the floorboards of history. Yet this first recording of his two violin concertos - substantial works both, downstream from Brahms, and with a hint of Sibelius - prove him to have been one of the more important Romantics, with a strong sense of drama, a sure hand for musical architecture and a natural flair for extended melody. The conductor of this recording, Gottfried Rabl, discovered Gradener's scores in the second-hand section of a Viennese music-shop many years ago and now, joined by the American violinist Karen Bentley Pollick, they are releasing this first album in a series intended to put Gradener's music before the modern public for the first time.

Derek Scott, born in Birmingham in 1950, has a long history of engagement with the British music hall and other forms of light entertainment, as both historian and performer. Many of his own compositions attest to this interest in popular styles, with his craftsmanship and natural feeling for a good tune producing music of immediate appeal. One of his two recent Dance Suites takes it's cue from ska, the twist and other enthusiasms from the early 1960s, and the other from older dance favourites. Time was when works like Arthur Benjamin's Jamaican Rumba and Percy Faith's arrangement of Alfven's Swedish Rhapsody No. 1 could be heard on every domestic radio and record-player; these good-natured Dance Suites recapture some of that lost innocence and it's relaxed energy - but his Serenade, another recent composition, touches gently on deeper feelings.