The electric guitar has long been the bogeyman of classical music. Despite the best efforts of composers from Tippett through to Reich, it often remains a suspicious visitor from a far more raucous culture. Zane Banks, a spirited young guitarist from Sydney, is determined to challenge such a view, beginning with this outstanding debut.

Ingwe is a seriously ambitious work that, at an hour’s length, may well be the longest contemporary classical composition yet written for the instrument. Australian Georges Lentz is a deeply honest composer for whom every note has personal meaning and for whom the world is a mysterious and at times sorrowful place. His massive cycle Caeli enarrant…, drawing in the bulk of his oeuvre since 1989, has become for Lentz a sort of “downward cycle” that reflects his growing disillusionment with the idea of God, a painful prognosis for a spiritually sensitive artist.

He wrote the first fragments of Ingwe late one night in his car after hearing the haunted tunings of a guitarist in an outback pub and completed the first draft years later in a Benedictine monastery in Luxembourg. Unlike many works for electric...