This is an original and inventive anthology of songs by Spanish composers, but avoiding the Castilian language, presenting instead works composed to texts in Galician, Basque and Catalan. Some of the composers’ names will certainly be reasonably familiar to hispanophiles – Joaquín Nin, Pablo Sorozabal and Jesús Guridi, for example – but others, such as Ricard Lamote de Grignon or José Moreno Bascuñana, are far more obscure.

The songs are grouped into sets of art songs and arrangements of folksongs from each linguistic region, but these can overlap with grouping by composer, as is the case with Sorozabal’s Siete Lieder, representing the Basque art song, or the four sublime settings from Mompou’s Combat del somni, representing the Catalan. The folk arrangements are frequently very striking: Nin’s set of three Galician songs, for example, is far more original harmonically than the three art songs (by Bascuñana, Rafael Ferrer and Cristóbal Halffter respectively) that precede them, which leads one to suspect that the necessity to preserve their modal melodic integrity dictated unusual harmonic solutions. On the other hand, this is not the case with Padre Donostia’s Basque folksongs, which positively revel in lush sentimentality, and it is here that Itziar Galdos is at her best; in general I find her vibrato somewhat unsubtle and an obstacle to the genuine colour in her voice.

The odd man out here is the cycle by Lamote de Grignon, in that the texts are poems by Tagore translated into Catalan. Musically they are affectingly Debussian, while García Morante’s versions of three of the best-known Catalan folksongs, including ‘El cant dels ocells’, aim for transparency. A disc for the specialist, this.