The Paraguayan Barrios (he added Mangoré later in life) and Brazilian Villa-Lobos were close contemporaries (born in 1885 and 1887 respectively) yet as composers were quintessentially different. Barrios was well schooled as a virtuoso and composer, for whom Chopin was a model, whereas Villa-Lobos was self-taught, and his Five Preludes (1940) became one of the most well-known pieces written for guitar. Few of Barrios’s pieces have enjoyed quite the same advocacy; the five given here are late pieces, composed between 1938 and his death in 1944, including the ‘Preludio’ to the renowned La Catedral, the other sections of which were written in 1914.

Like Barrios, the Cuban Leo Brouwer (b1939) is a formidable performer and no mean composer either, though of a more radical cast of mind. The four pieces played separately on the disc are from two pairs of pieces on popular Cuban melodies (1972, 1978), interleaved to make an effective super-suite. The Argentinian Jorge Cardoso (b1949) is younger still, another composer-guitarist with hundreds of works for the instrument – and a teaching method – to his credit. His Milonga (from 24 South American Pieces, 1976) is not didactic but a charming reworking of a 19th-century song.

I had not encountered Warren Nicholson before this privately produced disc (downloadable from iTunes) landed on my mat. He is an accomplished player with a fine legato and enviable control of phrasing, interpretation and personality. There is little sensational (in the worst sense) in his playing, the music presented in a straightforward, stylistically honest programme. Nicholson may not be Milo≈, perhaps, but one could do much worse than investigate these performances.