Barrios was an undisputed master of the guitar, Villa-Lobos a desultory practitioner, Ginastera a non-playing admirer of its unique sound world. Yet their compositions are equally successful in exhibiting an irresistible combination of sophistication and primitivism. The image, on the cover of Scottish guitarist Sean Shibe’s latest release, featuring the interior of a cathedral reclaimed by the jungle, speaks to this, as well as referencing Barrios’s inspiration for La catedral and the words of his poem Profesión de fe (‘Profession of Faith’), from which Shibe’s album takes its name.

And Shibe himself? As he writes in his booklet note: ‘All of these composers, with very different methods and results, use the guitar as a shamanic conduit to the heritage and destiny of South America.’ Consequently, ‘Profesión’ finds Shibe taking his questing, questioning artistry to the next (spirit) level. Nowhere more so than in Villa-Lobos’s 12 Études, which form the centrepiece of the recital. Villa-Lobos’s Bach homage, the third of his Five Preludes, slips seamlessly into Barrios’s La catedral like an extemporised organ prelude opening out into something more expansive yet equally intimate.

But the studies’ dazzling panoply of styles and techniques compels a fearless Shibe to penetrate further into the undergrowth, as the presiding spirits of the first few studies – Chopin, Paganini et al – are eventually overwhelmed by a maelstrom of Brazilian folk material and sometimes bizarre, seemingly sui generis gestures, many of which apparently confounded even the great Segovia. It’s an extraordinary account, bursting with nuance and personality and easily rivalling Julian Bream’s classic from 1978.

Ginastera’s Sonata itself boils down Argentine folk material and nearly every guitar technique known at the time into something more viscous and muscular – qualities that Shibe seizes on, and communicates, with a pervasive sense of astonishment, as though he’s discovering the piece for the first time yet has known it for ever. Now that’s guitar-playing.