Sucre, Bolivia, 2004. A man stops the American historian William L Lofstrom in the street and offers to sell him a selection of handwritten music manuscripts taken from a trunk he inherited from four deceased cousins. Lofstrom buys them, sensing their worth. The remainder of the music is eventually purchased, the totality comprising symphonies, Masses, chamber music, songs and instrumental music by the Peruvian-born composer Pedro Ximénez (1780-1857), former Master of Music at Sucre Cathedral.

Of the above works, only a solo guitar piece and a collection of 100 guitar minuets were ever published. According to the Peruvian guitarist Alexander-Sergei Ramírez, Ximénez’s minuets, relying as they do on European models but influenced by Latin American styles, provide a valuable link between the Viennese classical music of composers such as Ximénez’s contemporary Fernando Sor and the later guitar music of Latin American composers such as Barrios, Villa Lobos and Antonio Lauro.

Ramírez intersperses 23 of Ximénez’s minuets – which, amid glissandos, overlapping tones and vigorous strumming, move easily from the cleanly classical (No 1) through the sharply contrasted passages of No 98 to the richly textured, declamatory mode of No 76 – with anonymous late-18th and early-19th-century music taken from three notebooks found in Lima. Of especial interest here are a sonorous, Scarlattian Andante and an exciting D minor Fandango, both from the Cuaderno de Mathias Maestro of 1786. The playing throughout is outstanding and often better than the music, which, it has to be said, is possibly more of musicological than artistic value.