Mompou called this collection of so-called “Silent Music”, inspired by the poet San Juan de la Cruz, “a weak heartbeat” which, the disc's blurb informs us, “had the mission of penetrating into the most secret depths of our soul”. For this listener, the image that it conjured up was one of an elderly woman sitting alone in an armchair wreathed in blankets and freezing to death in an empty flat. I love Mompou's music, I really do, but these 28 miniatures, composed between 1959 and 1967, are an awful lot to take if you are of a fundamentally merry disposition.

This is not to doubt the sincerity or artistry of the soloist, though I do wonder if Señor Perianes is truly “considered by public and critics alike as one of the greatest revelations in Spanish music”, as the booklet tells us he is. He plays with an appropriately intense concentration and his control of delicate shadings at a consistently whispered dynamic level is admirable. The piano, too, is well recorded. Perhaps heard singly or in small batches each of these bleak internalisations might be more effective; but with so few distinguishing features between each one, the cycle heard in toto welcomes the listener into the arms of Morpheus as effectively as the impenetrable booklet (“What is said and what is not said vibrating at the same time and mutually enriching each other in the silence” [sic] is a representative sentence). At its conclusion I felt like emulating Thalberg who shouted all the way home after hearing Chopin play: “I need some noise because I've heard nothing but pianissimo all evening!”