This eccentric and often amusing collection contains Peter Dickinson’s rags, blues and take-offs in first recordings of all but one of the works. It supplements two other Naxos releases by the British composer, writer and pianist: Complete Solo Organ Works (8.572169) and Apocalypse-Larkin-Forgeries (8.572287). The rags are in the notated tradition of classical ragtime. Christopher Palmer said about Dickinson’s music, ‘Conflicts, juxtapositions, attempted syntheses—his work is full of them, all shook-up, all mixed up, all jazzed-up…yet always keenly imagined and meticulously reasoned and realised’. Dickinson has been hailed by Gramophone as ‘a composer who has escaped the confines of the predictable without ever ceasing to communicate’.