While Rodolfo Ritter’s repertoire encompasses many well-known and unfamiliar composers, he has made a speciality of Ponce’s piano music. He recorded the two piano concertos (for Sterling) in 2013, as well as several solo pieces. Now, for Piano Classics, he embarks on a new adventure, which should win new friends everywhere for an idiom full of charm and optimism, essentially Romantic in spirit and piquantly coloured by the composer’s Mexican heritage.

A social and cultural revolution followed on the heels of Mexico's political revolution of 1910-1917, as a once largely rural nation became, within a matter of years, predominantly urban. Born in 1882, Manuel Ponce in some ways embodied the outward-facing spirit of that revolution, as the country’s first internationally renowned composer of European-style art music (‘classical’), and yet in the nostalgia-soaked language of that music evoked a romanticised past. This is the tension explored by Rodolfo Ritter as he begins a multi-volume journey through Ponce’s piano output – only the second pianist to do so on record.

Ponce was something of a child prodigy, already accomplished and cultivated as both a pianist and composer before he entered the national conservatoire in 1901. Take the dance for the left hand titled Malgré tout, which Ponce was inspired to write in 1900 as a homage to the sculpture of the same name by Jesús F. Contreras – a resonant depiction of a chained and defenceless woman who, ‘despite everything’, looks up with hope (not so oblique as a politically charged metaphor). Earlier still is the bel-canto style lyricism of the Misterio doloroso (1899).

Another pivotal work for the left hand dates from a full quarter-century later, the Prelude and Fugue which Ponce wrote in Paris while under the tutelage of Paul Dukas. No less schooled by an earlier period of study in Europe, as a pupil of Martin Krause in Berlin, comes the Variations on a Theme by Handel (1906). In the interim, Ponce channelled this classical technique through the melodies and rhythms of his home country in pieces such as the Rapsodia Mexicana no.1 of 1911.

Volume 1 of Rodolfo Ritter’s survey contains all these and many more exciting discoveries. As a Mexican pianist, teacher and scholar of German heritage, Rodolfo Ritter is ideally placed to guide us through such unfamiliar territory.