Few pianists take a more honoured position in Spain’s musical life than Martin Jones. He now adds to his Iberian discography a two-disc album of music by Oscar Esplá (1889-1976), an essentially private composer, for the most part gentle, archaic and lost in reflection, though with the Sonata española (Homenaje a Chopin) as a vivid and demanding exception.

For booklet annotator Manuel Sánchez Monllor, Esplá’s piano music is a vehicle for profound emotion, though he does little to elucidate the quality of the individual works. There are occasional flavours of other composers, notably Mompou and Turina, though Esplá is less individual or entrancing than the former. The opening Romanza antigua’s swaying seduction makes it a close relation of Villa-Lobos’s Valsa da dor and even titles such as scherzo or estudio cannot tempt him away from gentleness to vivacity. The Suite de pequeñas piezas takes us from Bach to Offenbach and the folk element embedded in ‘Tarana’ from the Cantos de antaño will be familiar to lovers of Albéniz’s ‘Corpus Christi en Sevilla’. The ‘Canción de cuna’ from Lirica española shows Esplá at his most endearing. Natural, wide-ranging sound, and Jones’s performances could hardly be more skilled or affectionate.