Giovanni Guidi in Fitzrovia

As Giovanni Guidi sat at a grand piano in the Rosenfeld Gallery in London last night, amid a carefully spaced hang of abstract works by the Spanish painter Enrique Brinkmann, the Italian and his audience could be seen through the plate-glass window forming the gallery’s frontage. The occasional stroller along the narrow street in Fitzrovia would stop to look, and the sound must have leaked out to them, because at one point towards the end of the unbroken hour-long recital a young women glanced inside and, barely breaking stride, raised her arms and twirled in a perfect fouetté.

It’s easy to imagine how, even heard through plate glass, Guidi’s music might make a person want to do such a thing. Lyrical, romantic and rhapsodic, his playing reaches great emotional heights without ever lapsing into melodrama or self-indulgence. On this occasion he was playing solo, filling the acoustic spaces normally occupied by the fellow members of his sublime trio, the bassist Thomas Morgan and the drummer João Lobo, but the denser arpeggios and the more intense strumming came without penalising the sense of space and weightlessness he conjures.

Guidi is sparing in his use of standard tunes. When he approaches one, he tends to come at it sideways and by stealth, examining its parts individually and fitting them back together according to a scheme of his own spontaneous devising. To bring this set to a long, tapering close, he nudged phrases from “Over the Rainbow” into view, letting them merge seemingly in their own time, allowing them to settle, then speeding and slowing the process of reassembling Harold Arlen’s melodic components into waves of quietly glowing sound. The yearning of Yip Harburg’s unheard lyric can seldom have found a more powerful echo.

“My Funny Valentine” is the standard similarly anatomised in Guidi’s excellent new album, which finds the trio joined on a few of the seven tracks (the other six are original compositions) by the tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, a New Yorker with a rapidly growing reputation. Lewis fits his playing beautifully into the group’s habitual matrix, adding an extra dimension of careful lyricism. And, as has become customary in Guidi’s series of ECM releases, the album’s cover presents an abstract by another of Ian Rosenfeld’s artists, the French painter Emmanuel Barcilon. A worthwhile partnership all round.

* Giovanni Guidi’s A New Day is out now on the ECM label. Enrique Brinkmann’s paintings are on view until tomorrow (September 20) at the Rosenfeld Gallery, 37 Rathbone Street, London W1T 1NZ.