" All recordings on Naxos Classical Archives are available for streaming and downloading only. " I had a look at the catalogue on the Naxos site, and the number of Melodiya recordings in the series is very limited.

I can never understand it when people accuse Taneyev of being unemotional and lacking good melodies - I find him a really memorable melodist.

Meanwhile, since another thread has touched on Robert Simpson, let me draw your attention to Simpson's palindromic String Quartet No 9, an utterly jaw-dropping work, and perhaps his finest composition.

To understand Simpson's symphonies, you have to read his musicological output from about the same time (or have heard his radio talks). He tended to "discover" that the genius of <named composer> was that he was able to write music with <some sort of quality>. Then in the introduction to the premiere of Simpson's next symphony, he would say "in this work I have tried to express <some sort of quality>" - without mentioning that he was attributing this to <named composer> only a few months back. Thus Simpson's 1st is his Sibelius symphony, his 2nd is his Beethoven symphony, his 3rd is his Nielsen symphony, his 4th is his Bruckner symphony, his 5th is his Havergal Brian symphony and so on.

Don't get me wrong, I admire Simpson both as a composer and writer, and what other composer was ever a FRAS?

Incidentally, in the terms of the OP, I think many people would nominate Taverner's "Protecting Veil", which has to be considered in terms of its public impact, even if you are not (personally) particularly fond of it.

"China Battle" by Karl Amadeus Hartmann (c. 1942) - I was listening to it yesterday. In the downloads here.

Similarly, the concerto for piano, trumpet, vibraphone, double bass and orchestra is an odd line-up; by Andrei Eshpai.

He was 63 when he died, so even if he had lived, he might not have composed much more.

You mean like Mozart?  ;)

I recently discovered the piano concerto by Anatoly Kos-Anatolsky, which is a real rip-snorting barn-storming bravura piece in the Rachmaninoff style that would really knock audiences for six. Sadly, all the links to it on the web point to the same performance which sounds as if it was recorded in a swimming pool.

Better recording up front now please!

Really, I can't pick from the Stenhammer quartets - such a great sequence. Let me also advocate the string quartets of Taneyev as particularly attractive works.

My mistake, sorry - it must be in the downloads archive of that other place ... I can repost here if that is (a) allowed, (b) helpful.

Sorry to come in late on this, but most of the composers here are lesser known, but not REALLY lesser known. They all have their their wikipedia pages. I give you: Louis Thirion. So obscure, I can find almost no biographical information. But his symphony, available on YT in a terrible ancient radio recording, is a masterwork. I do not think you can find a more extreme fame-to-talent ratio.

I'm surprised no-one has mentioned Holmboe's Sinfonia Disintegrazzione, his response to the Nazi invasion of Denmark. Sadly, the only recording of the work is a complete mess, to the extent that in the scherzo the percussion section play a complete bar later than the rest of the orchestra.

The old criticism of Vivaldi that he wrote one concerto multiple times might be rehashed for Glass's symphonies. The problem is not so much repetition in the minimalist sense as re-suing the same tropes in work after work. But I will say this - they make excellent music for driving.

By the way, have you noticed how CDs of Glass's music constantly short-change the buyer, often with only 30-40 mins on each disc?

No, this is Jan Cikker ... I went to post it in downloads then found it was already there, and I am sure it is the same LP.