‘Gusto in art is power or passion defining any object’, wrote William Hazlitt. Gusto defines these performances – better than duende, which anyway is difficult for non-Spaniards fully to understand, much less define. Although the music itself, mostly by Spanish composers, is different. Even in Rodrigo’s courtly Concierto de Aranjuez, the spirit and sometimes the substance of flamenco are never far away.

By the performers’ own admission – as quoted by Andrew Mellor in his excellent booklet note – the programme attempts to imagine Spain ‘as a concept rather than a place’. Perhaps because their source of inspiration is Miles Davis’s ‘Sketches of Spain’ – which famously reimagines the Adagio of the Concierto de Aranjuez – the result is less conceptual and abstract, more muscular and visceral. Kellerman, Karlsen and the LPO treat the Rodrigo as new music. There is room for neither sentiment nor sentimentality, not even in the Adagio. The relationship between soloist and orchestra is the dialectic of the bullfight.

This quality is accentuated in Francisco Coll’s Turia. Here, composer, Kellerman and the Norrbotten NEO evoke an aestheticised violence with dramatic musical gestures thrown into sharp relief by contrasting caresses. The haunting habanera of Falla’s Homenaje and a gorgeous arrangement by Karlsen for guitar and ensemble of Albéniz’s ‘Evocación’ from Iberia dial the temperature down in a dance of dark and light, only for Pete Harden’s Solace and Shimmer for guitar and ensemble to return us to the Rodrigo – from which its harmonies are largely derived – and a languid, shimmering heat.