It’s been far too long since I last heard my fellow West Australian Craig Odgen live in concert. So this recording – the first time Ogden has finally been able ‘to collect all my favourite recital works and put them together on CD in the same way that I might plan a live programme’ – is very welcome indeed.

Listen in vain for thematic programming, novel juxtapositions, chronological sequencing or abstract structural underpinnings. This is the real thing: a hugely enjoyable potpourri of pieces that – with a couple of exceptions, perhaps – have not only been firm recital favourites of Ogden’s over the years but of lovers of classical guitar everywhere.

Maybe that should have been my concluding paragraph. But I wanted to make the point early: that, in Ogden’s words, this recital simply comprises ‘music that I love to play’. It’s also music that I’ve loved to listen to, and occasionally play, a balanced mix of original works for the guitar and transcriptions, from the Baroque to today, beautifully recorded in the outstanding Potton Hall. And if it’s not a record of a live recital per se, it may as well have been.

There’s a firm suppleness, a bravura, running like a live wire from Ogden’s opening Scarlatti, with its miniature rococo orchestrations, through to the final work, Miroslav Tadić’s exuberant Walk Dance. Or isolate an Albéniz strum, a Bach trill or a Coeck Constellation. It’s a by-now-instinctive dramatisation that grabs you by the whatsits with one hand while making graceful arabesques in the air with the other.