This, I can confidently state, is the first appearance in these pages of Adolf Barjansky (or Barzhansky). Born in 1850 (some sources say 1851) in Odessa (some sources say Moscow) into a wealthy Jewish family, he studied in Leipzig with Carl Reinecke and Salomon Jadassohn and also briefly in Vienna and Paris. Thereafter, he was active in Odessa, where he taught at the conservatory. He died in 1900. Rarely mentioned in any reference work, Barjansky is as obscure as they come.

All the works here are premiere recordings. So what is his music like? Julia Severus (German, b1968) has already exhumed several keyboard rarities on disc. Has she unearthed a forgotten genius or has she wasted her time? My feeling, based on this first volume of the promised complete works, is that Barjansky is intriguing, uneven, a magpie, sometimes inspired and individual but more often relying too much on what has gone before. Clearly, he knew his German classics.

The disc begins promisingly with the blistering Presto of the first of the Fantasy Pieces (1895), its theme uncannily reminiscent of Fela Sowande’s Festival March (an admittedly somewhat obscure organ work) written some 60 years later; No 3 could be mistaken for a sprightly Moszkowski étude or Gottschalk caprice. Either would make terrific encores. If the other four pieces are less memorable, were you told that they were short works by Grieg, say, or Tchaikovsky, most people would nod their heads happily in approval.

I cannot say the same for Barjansky’s four-movement Sonata No 1 of 1893. One website describes it as using ‘spatial sound as a principal means of expression, blending it with a highly modern simplicity and transparency of structure that anticipates 20th-century minimalism’. Barjansky’s gifts as a composer do not, by any stretch of the imagination, embrace such ambition. The fact is, the Sonata is terrible music, like Anton Rubinstein at his most vapid. It goes nowhere, with no memorable themes or narrative thrust and few signs of structural cohesion.

Far more rewarding are the Six Piano Pieces, Op 10 (1896), in which Barjansky shows, as in the Fantasy Pieces, his Mendelssohnian gift for melody in brief character morceaux, the best of which are ‘Near the Sea’, with its rumbling Lisztian left hand depicting the rolling waves, and the quirky chromatic No 4 ‘Scherzo’, another high-spirited end-of-recital bonbon.

The booklet (by the pianist) and recording are excellent, and Severus’s playing is accomplished enough to make us want to hear more of Barjansky – in the hope that his Sonatas Nos 2 and 3 are better.