Oskar Merikanto (1868–1924) made an enormous contribution to music-making in Finland, and to organ music in particular, as teacher, virtuoso performer and authority on performance practice, reforming the approach to the organ in both church and concert- hall. It was thought that all of his organ music was known and recorded, but recent discoveries have added a number of previously unsuspected works to his catalogue: a striking concert fantasia, an early funeral march, some pedal studies, a vast series of chorale preludes – some of them beautifully crafted miniatures, others only aphoristic ideas – and an organ transcription of a piano piece by Mendelssohn. This release is timed to mark the centenary of his death, on 17 February 1924.

This final instalment of the organ compositions of Axel Ruoff (born in Stuttgart in 1957) presents two starkly contrasted sides of his musical personality: three of them, for voice and organ, are concerned with the spiritual – two even addressing head-on the issue of death itself – and are thus solemn and hieratic, whereas the concluding work is a whimsical, tongue-in-cheek set of variations on ‘Happy Birthday’, written as a present for Ruoff’s publisher on his 80th birthday.

The Swiss composer Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865–1950) is best remembered for his development of Eurhythmics, which teaches the appreciation of music through movement. The buoyant miniatures recorded on this fourth album of his piano music document his fascination with dance, but nonetheless display a degree of variety: some are winsome and charming, others vigorous and folk-like, and occasionally they suggest echoes of some of his French contemporaries, not least Chabrier, Debussy, Fauré and Ravel.

Der magische Spiegel (‘The Magic Mirror’), a 1954 ballet by the Swiss composer Richard Flury (1896–1967), tells a pantomime tale of flirtation, cuckoldery, magical spells and perdition – but this is no puritanical morality play: using the limited resources of a chamber orchestra to surprisingly full-bodied effect, Flury conjures up a delightful sequence of dances – a generous number of waltzes, with a czardas, a bolero and more – that skip past in good-humoured succession. And behind its innocent title, the Little Ballet Music of thirty years earlier hides a buoyant dance-suite, scored with a feeling for colour that would have gone down well in Hollywood. This recording was made by the team – Paul Mann and the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra – responsible for a ‘pulsating’ recording of Richard Flury’s one-act opera Eine florentinische Tragödie.