I’ve been listening to a lot of Schumann lately, so it was with some pleasure I discovered that young Australian guitarist/composer Paul Ballam-Cross also finds Schumann “deeply inspiring” as he admits in the note on his self-titled debut recital.

Ballam-Cross’s Two Portraits of One Subject is dedicated to Schumann. But those same qualities of melancholy, intimacy and nostalgia permeate the entire programme, which comprises works by Schumann (of course), Bach (a favourite of Schumann’s), Tárrega (who adored Schumann’s music), Chopin (born the same year as, and championed by, Schumann) and Sor (whose three studies evoke a kind of Schumannesque saudade).

Tárrega’s preludes owe a debt to Chopin, and it is with Tárrega’s transcription of Chopin’s Mazurka No 4 that Ballam-Cross prefaces his sensitively rendered performances of those nine miniature masterpieces. He opens his recital, however, with Bach’s oft-performed-on-guitar Suite No 1 in G. He makes of it a spacious, searching prelude to the rest of the programme, which then moves through Sor to Ballam-Cross’s own lyrical, musical commentaries on Schumann’s work and personality, Chopin and Tárrega, before coming to rest, appropriately, on the latter’s transcription of Schumann’s Bunte Blätter No 1.

This is a beautiful and thoughtful debut, which as much as anything is an invitation to reverie, an intimate space for dreaming in the company of fellow dreamers.