Not much information is available about the Croatian composer Blagoje Bersa. He was born in Dubrovnik in 1873, dying in Zagreb in 1934. Clearly a proficient pianist, he spent most of his life teaching composition at the Zagreb Music Academy but also produced a number of orchestral works, three operas, and a good deal of piano music. His music has not had many recordings, or at least none that are generally available. (If you search ‘Bersa’ at Amazon you just get multiple pages of guns and weaponry.) Considering the quality of the music on this first volume of his piano output, his neglect seems incomprehensible.

Bersa was a contemporary of Fauré, Rachmaninov and Medtner, and there...