Poor Carl Czerny! Despite his pivotal position, being both a pupil of Beethoven and a teacher of Liszt, his reputation as a composer rests almost entirely on the multitude of taxing exercises and studies that are still the backbone of most serious pianists’ training. They are just a part of a vast oeuvre of 861 opus numbers he churned out. His music has always polarised critical opinion: Robert Schumann lambasted his ‘failure of invention’, while the first of Debussy’s 12 piano Études is a homage to Czerny, and Stravinsky appreciated the ‘full-blooded musician in him’.

His organ music was hitherto completely unknown to me. This appears to be its first commercial recording. Following a visit to England in 1837 (which included a performance at Kensington Palace for the future Queen Victoria), Czerny struck a deal with the English music publisher Robert Cocks, who took the collections of Voluntaries included here. The longest lasts three and a half minutes, the shortest just 29 seconds. For the most part they have a certain bland charm, being riddled with sequences and a fondness for diminished sevenths in their closing bars. They lack Mendelssohn’s comparable lightness of touch, variety of textures and – frankly – sheer melodic memorability. The strongest work on the disc is undoubtedly the opening Prelude and Fugue in A minor, an academically perfect piece of ersatz Bach with its double fugal subject, which is worked out with flawless counterpoint.

Iain Quinn lavishes his customary fastidious care on these trifles which, I fear, will be mostly of interest to completists.