The chances are that you are reading this because you have a lively musical curiosity which is not fulfilled by the standardised repertoire you hear in today’s concert halls and recordings. And you’re quite right: the amount of good music that doesn’t get heard is staggering. Some of it is by fairly prominent names, too. There are, for example, some forty Palestrina Masses that have not yet come before the microphones, and around 700 Lassus motets. No Telemann cantata-cycle has been recorded in its entirety. Much Handel awaits attention. There are even some Beethoven works that have not yet been recorded.

It’s when we get to the composers history has treated less well -- often through no fault of their music -- that the sheer volume of work that has yet to come before a modern audience is mind-boggling. Adolf Jensen was one of the leading figures of German Romanticism, but only a handful of his many songs have even been recorded. There’s almost nothing on CD by Giovanni Maria Nanino, Palestrina’s successor in Rome. Anton Reicha, born Antonín Rejcha in Prague in 1770, was thus an exact coeval of Beethoven’s; they were also close friends in Bonn from the age of fifteen, and their string quartets present evidence that they discussed musical problems together later in life in Vienna. And yet only one of Reicha’s forty or so string quartets has ever been recorded, and very little of his copious output of constantly inventive piano music. Beethoven’s student Carl Czerny is remembered these days only for his piano exercises, although he wrote so much concert and church music that no one has yet even catalogued it -- but what does surface is very close in style to his former teacher. How much music by the British Romantics Algernon Ashton and Percy Sherwood have you heard? Exactly! There are entire symphonic cycles by Russian composers of which tantalising tasters resurface now and then in crackly old Soviet recordings. The list is endless -- and when you add on the musical cultures with less well known traditions, in the Nordic and Baltic countries and elsewhere on the fringes of Europe, in Central and South America and elsewhere, it gets (even you’ll pardon the illogicality) even more endless.

Toccata Classics was founded in the hope of tackling this shortcoming head-on. It might be a journey that never ends, but it will be an exciting voyage of discovery nonetheless. And we hope that you will want to come on board for the ride. That’s where the Toccata Classics Discovery Club comes in. In the first place this music is being discovered for people like you (and then, of course, for audiences further afield, we hope). When you join the Discovery Club, you get instant access to everything we do at a considerable discount, and you’ll be able to buy new CDs -- still at a discount -- long before they come into the shops. We want you to share our sense of excitement as each new recording is made and our anticipation as it nears release.

It works both ways, too. We want Toccata Classics to be an interactive label, and you might know of some composer or work not yet on CD but who deserves an audience. So tell us! We want your suggestions and we need your support.