On the surface, prize-winning Icelandic guitarist Kristinn Árnason’s latest recording contains few surprises: a classic recital comprising chronologically ordered pieces from the Renaissance through to today, almost all of which are transcriptions, and a way of playing them which is more idiomatic to the modern classical guitar than to any of the source instruments such as the vihuela or the lute.

But there’s more going on here, and the title ‘Transfiguratio’, as well as the clever use of graphics, provides some clues. Each one of the seven symbols which adorn the cover is keyed to a particular composer: a harp symbol for the Renaissance vihuelist Alonso Mudarra because his Fantasia was written to imitate the playing of Ferdinand III’s harpist; a 10-string symbol for Romantic composer Johann Kaspar Mertz because he used a 10-string guitar; and so on.

Then there’s the fact that Albéniz and Granados’s piano music was in part inspired by, and has long been arranged for, the classical guitar; or that Emilio Pujol was an inveterate arranger; or that JS Bach actually arranged some of his lutenist friend Weiss’s music for harpsichord and violin. Finally, there is the transfiguration of sorts in Áskell Másson’s haunting Haustljó: Poème d’automne, dedicated to the memory of one of his relatives, the Icelandic guitarist Einar Kr Einarsson.

Árnason, whose teachers include Gordon Crosskey, José Tomas and Nicolas Goluses, is a musician of great intelligence; and if his generally linear approach is less suited to Weiss than to Másson, his imagination is such that the former feels as newly minted as the latter.