Listening a lot to Federico Mompou's piano pieces of late, thinking about what it means to play an instrument 'naturally'. His work manages to combine spontaneity with simple melodic and rhythmic motifs to produce something of lyrical beauty. Try Music Callada (Quiet Music) or the single piece, Pajaro Triste (Sad Bird). I'd recommend Stephen Hough's interpretations as a starting point. Here's a spotify playlist, if you like that sort of thing.
I was first exposed to the Catalan pianist in an intermission to Chris Marker's film, The Last Bolshevik (a film about "the tragedy of a pure communist in a world of would-be communists"1). Marker shows us a cat (presumably one of his), lying around on one of his keyboards at his home studio, listening to a piece of haunting, melancholic piano music. Sparse chords are sustained to form a naive melody that just hangs in the air, accelerating and decelerating effortlessly. This goes on for four minutes.
Mompou's music, subtle yet deceptively straight forward, hardly impresses itself on the world. It's miniature rather than minimal, willfully naive rather than merely simple, delicate rather than crassly emotional. The clarity of purpose and economy of means is breath-taking. The work is a labour of poetry.
His oeuvre has a remarkable continuity to it, with no attempts at a forced evolution or disruption of compositional method. The pieces are intimate and direct, almost immediately recognisable as Mompou; the sparsely populated melodic lines of unresolved chords with distinct contours are his own, the compositions exquisite, resolute in their sheer smallness.
He was likened to Debussy (see something like Charmes V as to why), but such a comparison is unfairly reductionist; he constructed his own miniature sound world in which every note was an essential detail. Known for his humility, Mompou never knowingly attracted attention to himself during his lifetime.
I composed only for myself. I hate bravura music, the big things. I am a simple person. 2
- Federico Mompou, architect of quiet worlds, 1893-1987
[1] Viktor Dyomin
[2] Federico Mompou: Catalonian Composer Magnifico (pdf)