This varied selection of Catalan art songs by tenor Isaí Jess Muñoz, including one he and his wife Oksana Glouchko commissioned from the Seoul-based Catalan-American composer Elisenda Fábregas, serves equally the troubadour under the balcony and the lovers inside. Each song illustrates the performers’ guidelines concerning ‘the sung application of the Catalan language’, exquisitely sensitive to the music in the poetry, suffused by passion and romance.

In the third poem of Eduard Toldrà’s La rosa als llavis, after the singer has asked for a kiss, they let the piano tones pulse for a wonderfully long 20 seconds before dying away. In another, Muñoz catches the spirit of a more aggressive lover. Ricard Lamote de Grignon i Ribas’s settings of Homeric hymns praise Aphrodite, Zeus, the Muses and Apollo with sudden streaks and secret serenades of lyrical beauty, serene and chaste but erotically charged. In Narcís Bonet’s Haidé, a moment of ecstasy is followed by a Bach-like chorale and an arioso praising the sacrifice of love and emotion. Mompou’s Combat del somni are songs in the grand tradition, with the piano laying out lines in inevitable waves of quiet enchantment.

Fábregas’s Imitació del foc is a song-cycle of size and invention setting poems on the elemental mysteries and power of fire by the Balearic poet Bartomeu Rosselló-Pòrcel, entering a large universe with florid passages in the piano as the poetry forces the music to expand harmonic frames. Muñoz’s booklet notes address performance-practice issues and the challenge of reviving this remarkable repertoire.