The American critic Robert Reilly described the music on Volume One of this cycle of the complete string quartets of David Matthews (b. 1943) as 'some of the most concentrated, penetrating writing for this medium in the past 30 years or more. It is musical thinking of the highest order and quartet writing in the great tradition of Beethoven, Bart�k, Britten, and Tippett'. This fourth CD in the series presents Matthews' String Quartet No. 11, a set of variations on the eighth of Beethoven's Op. 119 Bagatelles, his own contribution to the 'Diabelli' Variations and his complete Beethoven transcriptions for string quartet.

Like his close friend and colleague Shostakovich Shebalin (1902-63) knew a life of both celebrity and hardship. He was condemned in the infamous '48 Party congress in Moscow and in later life he fought to overcome a series of crippling strokes. His personality remained undaunted by these tribulations as his music resolutely proves.

As pianist, conductor and composer, Jean Louis Nicode (1853-1919) was one of the most highly respected musicians of his day. Born in Posen in Prussia (Poznan in presentday Poland), he became a stalwart of musical life in Dresden in the closing years of the nineteenth century. Today his name is as good as unknown, with his music suffering the same fate as his reputation as a performer - although he was a highly accomplished composer. His piano music has hints of Chopin, Liszt and Schumann, and the spirit of dance is never far from the surface, but his expansive, and only, piano sonata has a visionary quality with it's origins in late Beethoven.

Most of the chamber music of Robert Simpson (1921-97) was recorded by Hyperion in the 1980s and '90s, but there remained some gaps in that discography. The Robert Simpson Society has sponsored two albums to plug them, this first one including an early string quartet and two songs that came to light only after the composer's death. In later life Simpson used to say that poems good enough to set to music didn't need it - but these two youthful essays prove that he was already a master. Simpson wrote the D major string quartet as a student at Durham; an examiner described it as 'fearless'. The two mature works - vintage Simpson - bring his sense of symphonic momentum into the clarinet repertoire.

Percy Grainger (1882-1961) and Ronald Stevenson (1928-2015), both composer-pianists of the Golden Age of keyboard virtuosity, shared a passion for folksong, especially the modal Celtic melodies from the fringes of the British Isles. Though the two never met, they corresponded for many years, with Stevenson arranging many of Grainger's transcriptions in a deliberate act of homage to the older man, whose quirky originality brought Stevenson illumination on his own idiosyncratic path. This seventh instalment in Christopher Guild's Toccata Classics survey of Stevenson's piano music uncorks the exultant good humour that he and Grainger found on that common Celtic ground.

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. This fifth album of his duets for harp and piano ends a series that has seen the revival of music unheard for over a century and a half.

Born in Maryland in 1954, John Stamp - universally known as 'Jack' - is a well-known figure, both as conductor and composer, in the symphonic wind-band movement that flourishes in US universities. But the sound of the brass band familiar in the UK has long been an enthusiasm, and his involvement with brass bands on both sides of the Atlantic - particularly the Minneapolis-based Lake Wobegon Brass Band, which takes it's name from Garrison Keillor's fictional Minnesota town - has generated a number of works which bring elements of the British brass tradition to audiences in the US Mid-West, imbuing them with a catchy rhythmic swing.

Lubomir Pipkov (1904-74) was one of the leading members of the so-called 'second generation' of Bulgarian composers. In later life he became fascinated with the ancient heritage of Bulgarian folk-music, writing a series of what he called 'metro-rhythmical studies' - piano miniatures that combine melodic immediacy and rhythmic complexity, with a character that might be loosely characterised as sounding like 'Prokofiev meets Bartok in the Balkans'. Indeed, Pipkov saw in the irregular rhythms of Bulgarian folk-dance a parallel with the rhythmic experimentation in contemporary composers like Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky.

Like so many important Austrian musicians forced into American exile by the Nazis, Richard Stohr (1874-1967) suddenly found himself cast from celebrity into obscurity, The optimism and energy, even defiance, of these three works from 1942 suggest that he took it on the chin, with his musical language retaining it's Viennese accent in an individual amalgam of Bruckner, Mahler, Schmidt and Korngold. Indeed, the echoes of Mahler in Stohr's Second Symphony may be a deliberate homage if, as seems possible, this 1942 version is a revision of a now-lost work first composed shortly after Mahler's death.

As with many other Australian composers, the music of Linda Kouvaras (b. 1960) has a strong sense of wide-open spaces, expressed in lyrical, elegiac melodic lines that soar over freewheeling Lisztian piano textures and atmospheric echoes of French Impressionism. In this second album of a series presenting all of her instrumental works, chamber music and songs written since 1991

The Roman Maria Rosa Coccia (1759-1833) was a musical phenomenon of almost Mozartian precocity, becoming the first female composer to be awarded the professional distinction of maestra di cappella - at the age of fifteen. But the church could not contemplate the idea of a woman in charge of the music-making in a religious establishment, and so she hit a stained-glass ceiling; she seems to have given up composition in the mid-1780s, not yet 30. The freshness and buoyancy of her writing up to that point give an indication of what might have been.

The composing traditions of the nine Balkan countries are as good as unknown in the rest of the world. In this revelatory piano recital, the Albanian pianist Amir Xhakoviq presents a glittering array of keyboard jewels from his own country and it's neighbours, ranging from wild and energetic toccatas to timeless evocations of bells and other ancient traditions, with a surprisingly wide range of references, from folk-music to Scarlatti and jazz.

The Hamburg-born Ferdinand Thieriot (1838-1919) not only shared a teacher - Eduard Marxsen - with Brahms; both composers 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 third Toccata Classics volume prove, in their exquisite balance of depth and beauty.

This CD commemorates the 100th birthday of the Norwegian composer and organist Leif Solberg (b. 1914). Solberg’s only symphony (1950–51) is a major discovery: it confirms the contrapuntal mastery evident in his magisterial organ works, investing it with a touch of sardonic humor and the dancing rhythms of Norwegian folk-music. The choral Good Friday Meditation, by contrast, points to the lyrical side of his muse. Conductors Paul Mann and Marit Tøndel Bodsberg, organist Tim Collins, the Liepāja Symphony and the Solberg Centenary Singers feature in this tribute to this long-lived composer.

One of the unsung heroes of modern music, English composer Robin Walker (b. 1953) writes music which he descirbes as ‘passionate classicism,’ fusing together discipline and subjective emotion. Four exciting works have been chosen for this album, all of which display his vigorous and exciting orchestral composition style. He attributes his stylistic choices to his three decades living on the farms in northern England, developing a close relationship with the primacy of nature. Conductor Alexander Walker, of no relation to the composer, has performed all over the globe with the world’s finest symphonies. For this recording, he conducts the Novaya Rossiya Symphony Orchestra.