This – presumably – final instalment of Martinu’s solo piano music is once again a real mix of the juvenile and the mature, large-scale and miniatures of Webernian brevity. The quality is variable, too, perhaps more so than on previous volumes, but even where the inspiration ran thin – as in the pallid From Anderson’s Fairy-Tales – the music is neatly made and not unpleasant to hear. At its best (and first-rate Martinu˚ is not really on show) it is highly engaging; in the Foxtrot and Avec un doigt (the one finger belonging to a third hand, here provided by Giorgio Koukl’s wife), a hoot.

The disc opens with the largest items, two suites based on fairy-tales. Goldilocks (1910), however, has no connection with the familiar children’s stories but is an autobiographical, Elektra-inspired concoction based allegedly on a failed love interest. The programmatic details were left hazy by the composer (who dramatically marked the score “never to be performed”) as indeed in the Andersen pieces which overall are overlong and weak. The remaining works are vibrant small occasional pieces – like the brilliant Merry Christmas 1941 – or mini tone-poems such as Le train hanté, minor gems that add further to the human detail of this immensely human composer. There is delicacy here, too, as in The Little Lullaby, Jaro and the minuscule Children’s Pieces.

Koukl glides effortlessly through all the pieces (some of which sound decidedly tricky) and once again produces a programme of enjoyment and interest in equal measure. A splendid recording, too, made once more at Lugano Conservatoire in Switzerland, a model of balance for this music.