Listening to a Franz Halász album is like biting into a Granny Smith. The playing is always fresh, crisp, juicy and bracingly tart. But where Granny Smiths tend to taste the same, Halász likes to offer something different each time, even when the repertoire is hardly outré. So, among the warhorses by Granados, Albéniz, Falla, Sor and Tárrega (Lágrima, no less!) is the first recording of Turina’s Guitar Sonata to use the facsimile of ‘a manuscript made by the Spanish Authors’ Society copyist on the basis of Turina’s original manuscript, which is apparently lost’.

Why this source? As Stanley Hanks goes on to explain in his fascinating booklet note: ‘Segovia [for whom the work was written] is known to have been quite wilful in imposing changes upon composers, which they tended to accept meekly. A total of 127 differences have been noted between the manuscript and the publication.’ It’s a brilliant, exciting performance, suffused with a febrile tension and, even in the more lyrical passages, an urgency that characterises nearly all the other performances here – even, most compellingly and surprisingly, the group of six pavans by Renaissance vihuelist Luis de Milán. That, and a choral rather than orchestral quality – has Falla’s Homenaje ever sounded so desperately plangent? – in which, most noticeably perhaps in the transcriptions of the piano works by Albéniz, each voice is allowed its independence, its soul.

When reviewing an album of Spanish music, it’s usually best to avoid once poetic, now hackneyed terms such as ‘passionate intensity’. But in this case, it’s spot on.