The first thing to note about this intriguing disc is the eye-catching cover: the two pianists pictured in front of one of my country’s iconic images from the past: a red telephone kiosk. For the Russian piano duo this represents Britain; but ironically, though the programme is of works for two pianos by four British composers whose names begin with B (hence the disc’s title, ‘“B” Like Britain’), only Bowen’s sounds unmistakably British.

The second thing to note is the disconcerting acoustic of the first five tracks (Bax and Britten) due to the placement of the microphones at what sounds like the back of the audibly empty Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. The result is a far from pleasantly engaging recorded piano tone. Bax’s Hardanger (1927) begins and ends in an exuberant Norwegian pastiche; The Poisoned Fountain (1928) which follows boasts a weirdly unattractive texture (I thought I was somehow inadvertently playing two unrelated tracks simultaneously). This and Moy Mell (The Happy Plain), ‘an Irish tone poem’ (1916), are not items I shall return to readily. Next is Britten in that same reverberant acoustic, a lively account of the ‘Introduction and Rondo alla burlesca’ paired with the ‘Mazurka elegiaca’, a work recorded on an old Decca 78 by the composer and Clifford Curzon but which remains irredeemably dour for this listener.

And then things pick up. Recorded, from the sound of it, at a different session and with a slight but beneficial change of microphone positioning, York Bowen’s Theme and Variations (1951) is a revelation and, arguably, the best-written piece here. Whereas the others you can imagine in orchestral garbs, this is piano qua piano. Berlinskaya and Ancelle play the theme, its nine variations and ‘interlude’ superbly – and their dispatch of the exhilarating con fuoco finale will give you goosebumps. Their ensemble and sensitive phrasing throughout the disc are remarkable. Here, they are outstanding.

Finally we have Richard Rodney Bennett’s 1974 Divertimento, an entertaining quartet of pastiches of very un-British dance movements (samba, country blues, ragtime, hard rock), again expertly and effectively laid out for two pianos, now definitely of their time. ‘Groovy’ is the word that springs to mind.