The blurb on the back cover claims that the present recording comes across ‘like a live recital’. Perhaps this has to do with the engineering’s somewhat distant perspective, yet these words equally apply to Hermine Forray’s briskly spirited, colourful and communicative renditions of Debussy’s Tarantelle styrienne and Chopin’s Tarantelle. She occasionally over pedals and pushes the tempos, but it doesn’t matter. However, Forray’s rhythm goes all over the place in Debussy’s ‘Les collines d’Anacapri’, while the Chopin Barcarolle lacks dynamic variety and direction.

Both Iberia selections fare much better and reveal Forray’s innate affinity for Albéniz’s texturally complex idiom. The lyrical episodes in Liszt’s Tarantella tend to meander in Forray’s hands but she conveys exciting momentum in the virtuoso dancelike episodes.

Forray’s finest work occurs in Yannis Constantinidis’s eight Dances from the Greek Islands. The third dance features independent lines that lie close to one another on the keyboard and are not so easy to untangle and differentiate, yet Forray does so with the utmost of ease. She also balances the fourth dance’s alluring tunes and gentle ostinatos in multi-dimensional perspective, and ever so slightly varies her phrasing and emphasis with each of No 6’s melodic reiterations. The Constantinidis Dances plus the Chopin and Debussy Tarantellas are keepers.