British pianist and composer John McCabe is best known for his landmark Haydn sonata cycle on Decca, but he was very much a specialist in 20th-century music. McCabe, who died in 2015, was also a regular visitor to Australia, where in 1985 he made this recording of music by Australian and American composers, subsequently lost, but now unearthed by his wife Monica McCabe, salvaged from a Dolby cassette copy of the master tape.

What emerges are fine, atmospheric performances – despite never having received the edits the pianist hoped to make before the project was shelved – of what are still relatively rare works, several recorded here for the first...