For sheer ineptitude of presentation this disc scores ten out of ten. It contains 24 tracks, but only 22 are listed, even then unnumbered(!), so that confusion is at once created; what’s more, the titles as printed are badly mangled, with several mistakes; also, which two of Cervantes’s 41 Danzas are performed is not divulged (they don’t seem to know that more than one is played), Granados’s A la cubana is in error split into two tracks, and no titles are given for Ginastera’s three Danzas argentinas. Intim Musik should be ashamed of itself: if I were Clelia Iruzun I’d be very cross.
This extremely able pianist, who studied in London and Paris as well as her native Rio de Janeiro and was a child prodigy, offers a wide variety of dances – including the maxixe, the congada (this one originally for orchestra), the ritual jongo and farrapos (this last actually African), the carnival frevo and the Colombian bambuco ‘pursuit’ dance, besides the ubiquitous tango in its many guises, from the naivety of Nazareth’s to the dark hues of Nobre’s. At her best in slow, expressive pieces like the Ginastera Milonga or his ‘Danza de la moza donosa’, where she shows sensitive phrasing – though she makes too much of a meal of Godowsky’s lush additions to Albeniz’s Tango – in other places Iruzun is apt to let fly and hit too hard, going through the tone (as in the Nobre pieces and, particularly, the Fernandez). But where keyboard virtuosity is called for, as in the exhilarating Nepomuceno maxixe (which Milhaud seems to have heard), she is dependably brilliant, and her well-arranged programme usefully provides a number of items new to the catalogue.'