Having a sweet tooth and a fondness for heady bravura concertos, I’ve had a soft spot for Manuel Ponce’s Piano Concerto (premiered in 1912) ever since it appeared on the much-lamented ASV label in 1995 (Jorge Federico Osorio conducted in fine style by Enrique Bátiz – 1/96, 8/96). It features in this concert devoted to Ponce’s music recorded in December 2012 at the Teatro de la Paz in San Luis Potosí (capital of the eponymous Mexican state). Its lush romantic themes and Lisztian fireworks bordering on pastiche are given a confident, no-holds-barred performance by siblings Zaeth and Rodolfo Ritter.

After this comes the world premiere recording of Ponce’s Second Piano Concerto, left unfinished at this death in 1948. More than 50 per cent of the booklet’s seven pages of discursive music notes are devoted to it, a proportion not, sadly, justified by the musical interest of the work’s two extant brief movements.

This and the other works here are, of course, in a more advanced harmonic tonal language than the Concierto romántico. Ferial, Ponce’s 1940 tone-poem depicting ‘an afternoon in a fair of a little town near Teotihuacan’ (the composer), is an exuberant, quintessential South American piece of the kind that earned Ponce the title of ‘father of Mexican music’. I could have wished for the recorded sound to have been crisper and less generalised. The remainder of the disc features piano solos from Rodolfo Ritter: Preludios encadenados – four ‘chained’ or ‘linked’ contrasting preludes from 1927; and Cuatro Danzas mexicanas (1941), another quartet but of separate miniatures, none longer than two minutes, any one of which would make an attractive encore.

Apropos the booklet with its colourful front cover, a painting by Julian Ritter (the father of the pianist and conductor?), what makes an editor of a booklet hand over the translation to someone whose knowledge of English is sketchier than a Google translate button? The essay by Rodolfo Ritter could and should have been authoritative. As it is, its mirth-making solecisms let down the label and the customer.