Saudade means a melancholy longing, and the São Paulo-born guitarist Plínio Fernandes’s debut recording is suffused with it. The repertoire he offers here leans heavily on arrangements of popular songs – the music he heard and loved growing up in Brazil before he moved to London in 2014 to study at the RAM – with Villa-Lobos’s Five Preludes as the centrepiece.

I discovered Villa-Lobos’s exquisite quintet of miniatures in my early teens thanks to a cassette tape of Julian Bream’s 1956 recording (Westminster, 5/61), and I still treasure a now well-worn LP of his marvellous RCA remake (2/72). There are other fine accounts, of course, including an intensely expressive one from the 1990s by Fernandes’s teacher Fabio Zanon (on Music Masters), but Fernandes’s might be my new favourite.

His tone is gloriously rich – far warmer and rounder than either Bream or Zanon. Not only that but he’s acutely attentive to detail. Note the way he colours the changing harmonies in the central section of No 2, for instance (starting at 1'12"), as well as the sense of urgency he imparts, and how beautifully this contrasts with his flirtatious rubato in the outer sections. Or turn to No 4, where he carefully differentiates between the forte of the melody and the accompanying pianissimo chords; it’s almost as if two instruments were playing.

The popular selections are nicely varied and Fernandes takes just as much care with them as he does in the Preludes. Thus a harmonically complex song such as ‘Ponta de Areia’ by Milton Nascimento (from the 1975 album ‘Minas’) is subtly shaded. Impressive, too, is the way he rarely allows the pervasive feeling of saudade to melt into mere sentimentality, even in numbers that seem frankly sentimental, such as Chilean songwriter Violeta Parra’s ‘Gracias a la vida’, which Fernandes plays here with great feeling.

And there are guests. Cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason plays the vocal solo of the Aria from Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras No 5 with eloquence and surprising sinew. Legendary Brazilian pop singer Maria Rita gives an intimate and almost conversational performance of ‘O mundo é um moinho’ by Angenor de Olivera (better known as Cartola). And Braimah Kanneh-Mason takes a similar approach to Rita in Sergio Assad’s ‘Menino’. Despite the young violinist’s restraint, however, the result is still a little too sweet for my taste, but I think it’s just the nature of the music itself in this case.

An impressive and highly enjoyable debut, all told. Might Decca be persuaded to have Fernandes record Villa-Lobos’s 12 Études in the not-too-distant future?