Many years ago I developed a huge passion for the music of Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu.

I have no real idea how the interest developed, but I suspect it might have been in the family. Though my father's core musical interest lay in the great Austro-German tradition, to judge from his vast library of recordings - vinyl, of course: he's been dead since 1978 - there were always oddities cropping up; his collection of Janacek operas was the first I knew. And there were many recordings in his collection which bore the unmistakable livery of the Supraphon label, a primary source for recordings of Czech music in those days.

I was hooked by Martinu's music. I loved its immediacy and directness. I loved the chuntering qualities in its momentum. It seemed to motor along in the way that Bach's Brandenburg Concertos did. I loved the flavour of the music; it had a real clang. I loved its language; it had modernistic bite but was never alienating. I loved its neo-classical drive; I never called it Stravinskian, despite Petrushka - to me it was Martinuvian. (Did I just make up that word?) Above all, I adored the fact that Martinu seemed to work the piano into almost every orchestral piece he wrote. This was antithetical to the great Austro-German symphonic repertoire of the 18th and 19th centuries; but Martinu, for me, made the piano an integral and idiomatic instrument in an orchestral texture. To my relatively young ears, the piano had enormous potential as a weapon in an orchestral piece.

To be honest, I was also aware that no single piece grabbed me to the extent that I would sit and listen to it repeatedly, being drawn deeper into its core. It never had what I call the Beethoven or Brahms effect on me. I wasn't sure of its depth, though I have never joined in on the criticism that Martinu's music is facile, shallow or uneven in its quality. It simply is what it is. It naturally followed me into the job on The Herald in the early 1980s, though, with the sheer volume and breadth of live and recorded music I had to listen to on a daily and weekly basis, to say nothing of the administrative elements of the job, or of beginning to learn something about the musical politics of Scotland's cultural affairs, the music of Martinu, and other composers in whom I had a special personal interest, began to recede onto the sidelines.

That was a shame, because Martinu is such an interesting character and composer and, broadly, his music is relatively neglected. Though there have been sporadic outbursts of interest, with occasional performances of his symphonies or concertos, he's never become a mainstay in the repertoire. The music needs championing. Martinu had a curious upbringing. He was born in 1890 in Policka, where his father was bell-ringer and fire-watcher in the local church tower. That tower was where Martinu was brought up for the first 12 years of his life. His educational fortunes were mixed: he was thrown out of the Prague Conservatoire for negligence, but he must have been a cracking violinist, because he played in the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra (which, by an odd coincidence, will be in Scotland three weeks from tomorrow, playing in the Usher Hall, though not playing any of their former colleague's music).

When Martinu did start to compose seriously, the music poured out of him. He wrote an enormous amount of music, close on 400 compositions of extraordinary diversity, with six symphonies, five piano concertos, other concertos for violin, viola, oboe and harpsichord, multiple operas and ballets, masses of chamber music, sundry orchestral pieces, tons of instrumental and choral music and myriad little instrumental pieces. He wrote fast and prolifically. That, say some, was his weakness: not enough time taken, not enough depth explored.

He's come winging back into my mind and onto this page for two reasons: a recent live performance and a new recording have brought it all back to me with a reminder that we should be doing more to remember this fine composer's output. Martinu's Three Madrigals For Violin And Viola from 1947 is a superb, 15-minute, three-movement piece, very Bachian in its fast outer movements and atmospheric in its central movement. It was played recently in Perth by members of the Heath Quartet; and you can find the original performance, by the music's dedicatees, the Fuchs siblings, recorded in 1948, on YouTube. Give it a whirl: it's a terrific piece. As is Martinu's exhilarating Concerto For Two Pianos And Orchestra, on a new recording featuring the two Serbian Bizjak sisters on the Onyx label, reviewed tomorrow in the Sunday Herald, and well worth hearing.