Like those Thomas Browne describes in his Urne-Buriall, who “took a lasting adieu of their interred Friends, little expecting the curiosity of future ages should comment upon their ashes”, most of the composers on this fascinating debut recording by Melbourne organist Robert James Stove would have had ear and eye on practicality rather than posterity. Yet here is their music resurrected, opening a window on the organ utterances echoing in the northern parts of the Hapsburg Empire during the 16th and early 17th centuries.

As Stove points out, “one would need to characterise (the music’s) idiom as broadly conservative. The Monteverdian harmonic and textural revolutions largely passed it by”. But in the works of Georg...