Mompou Piano Music by Clélia Iruzun

Federico Mompou occupies one of the more peculiar niches in twentieth-century piano music — Spanish by birth, Catalan by sensibility, Parisian by formation, and ultimately answerable to no school at all. He studied at the Conservatoire, absorbed the Impressionists without becoming one, and returned to Barcelona carrying something rarer than influence: an original sound. His music asks very little of the ear and everything of the fingers’ capacity for stillness. It is intimate to the point of secrecy.

Which makes the discography — crowded and still growing — a genuinely interesting problem. How do you record music that seems to evaporate under scrutiny?

Clélia Iruzun is a Brazilian pianist I hadn’t followed closely before this disc arrived, and she turns out to be a more nuanced advocate than the crowded field of Mompou interpreters might have room for. The program she’s assembled here spans roughly half a century of composition, from the earliest Impresiones Intimas through the Cançons i Danses and on to the late, Chopin-haunted variations. It’s a smart arc — you hear the composer from near the beginning of his voice to something close to its maturity.

The Impresiones Intimas, written in the years just before the First World War, are where Mompou’s peculiar world first coheres. These are miniatures in the truest sense — not short pieces that wish they were longer, but things perfectly fitted to their own small scale. Iruzun plays the complete set, and her feel for harmonic color is acute. She understands that the music’s apparent simplicity is a kind of trap: push the pedal too hard, linger too lovingly on any single chord, and the whole fragile architecture collapses into sentimentality. She mostly avoids that danger. Her voicing is careful without being fussy, and in the more introspective pieces she finds a quality of suspended time that is exactly right. The “Melancholy Bird” sketch is handled with particular delicacy — no exaggerated rubato, no underlining of the obvious.

Comparison with the composer’s own 1974 recordings is unavoidable. Mompou at the piano was a revelation and a rebuke simultaneously — older than most performers who attempt this music, technically limited by then but rhythmically alive in ways that younger pianists rarely match. His Cançons i Danses had a dry, almost percussive quality, the pedal light, the dance pulse never quite suppressed beneath the lyric surface. He knew something about these pieces that no amount of study fully transmits.

Iruzun’s second Cançons i Danses sounds, against that standard, a touch studied — the phrasing a shade too considered, the natural lilt slightly weighted down by interpretive intention. But her fifth is genuinely lovely, the chording full and balanced in a way that illuminates the harmonic architecture rather than merely decorating it. And her sixth surpasses what I’ve heard from Olena Kushpler in a competing version — Kushpler takes the music at a pace that, while not without appeal, seems to work against its natural grain.

Pessebres — the Nativity scenes — is one of the stranger items in Mompou’s catalog, extroverted by his reclusive standards. Three movements, three characters: dancer, hermit, shepherd. Iruzun characterizes all three with real conviction. The shepherd’s music, in particular, is a terrific little study in evocation — she’s slightly more reserved than Mompou himself was, which actually works in her favor here. The composer’s directness sometimes edges toward the perfunctory in this piece.

Then there are the Variations on a theme of Chopin, assembled over nearly two decades and containing some of Mompou’s most searching writing. The theme is borrowed from Chopin’s Prelude in A major — that brief, luminous thing — and what Mompou builds from it across twelve variations and an epilogue is something simultaneously deferential and deeply personal. Each variation reads as a character piece rather than a technical exercise, and collectively they form a meditation on influence and transformation that has no real equivalent elsewhere in the literature. Iruzun understands their directness and doesn’t overstuff them with imported expression.

This is estimable work. Not the last word on any of it — the composer’s own recordings remain essential, and the complete picture of Mompou’s solo piano music is still being assembled by various hands. But Iruzun is a pianist worth listening to, in music that deserves far more attention than the broader concert world gives it.