Carl Herring graduated from the Royal Academy of Music with first-class honours in 2003, and is a recipient of both the Julian Bream Prize and the Worshipful Company of Musicians’ Ivor Mairants Award. Subsequent activities have included much performing in the UK and abroad, as well as work in opera and on film soundtracks. “Burnt Sienna” is Herring’s second disc; his first, “Azure”, was released in 2004 to favourable reviews. I look forward to hearing the title of his next album – “Alizarin Crimson”, perhaps?

Jokes aside, though, this is a superb disc and the title is justified. As Herring says, “Burnt Sienna is the colour that best captures not only [the] warmth, but also the earth, honest rustic and immediate quality of this music.” That music includes two attractive works by Herring himself, in which he is accompanied by tabla-player Bhupinder Singh. Elsewhere, Herring is joined by Demi Garcia Sabat on cajón and tinaja.

Much of the programme is indeed an unrelentingly sunny affair, with just Baden Powell’s melancholy Valsa sem nome and some parts of Piazzolla’s Las cuatro estaciones porteños threatening rain. But Herring does possess a sparkling technique and his amiable musicality radiates warmth, so perhaps that’s as it should be. The only real shadow in this otherwise sunlit landscape is the too-driven quality he brings to Villa-Lobos’s Chôros No 1.

Exceptionally well recorded and smartly packaged, and with a fold-out cover that includes brief commentaries on each work, “Burnt Sienna” is the kind of disc that would brighten anyone’s day.