Try the first 25 seconds of this CD on a musical friend and ask that friend who the composer is, and I'll bet it takes more than a few moments to get the answer, ''Bach''. You hear a piano playing fortissimo in octaves, and somehow this and the way Zoltan Kocsis plays them together throws one right off the scent. Play just the first eight of those octaves and your friend may well hazard the guess that he's hearing Bartok; the notes and the way Kocsis leans on the first of them are so suggestive of the Hungarian composer that I feel the pianist must mean this to be so. Doubtless this also has something to do with the fact that these chorale preludes are transcriptions by Kodaly, but just to complicate matters, when enormous chunky piano chords come along at 1'53'' with the characteristic short-long Hungarian rhythm (I'm sure Bach never wrote this) it sounds straight out of a Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody.
Where is the cellist in all this, you ask? Making only a tiny contribution which sounds almost as if he's playing different music in a different mood. The Vater unser transcription is less eccentric, though again with heavy piano writing, but that of BWV747 is ridiculously overblown and out of style, again almost wholly in terms of the piano writing with the cello mostly playing the chorale melody although it is given a passage of harmonics at 1'38''. These Bach transcriptions strike me as wilfully unstylish; and though the playing is skilful in its own terms (Kocsis is a major artist and Perenyi does what he can with his limited notes), I can't think that many people will want to listen often.
The Debussy Petite Suite is a different matter. Kocsis is exceptionally good in this composer's music for piano solo and has here made sensitive arrangements in which both instruments share the melodic interest; the performance has the right rhythmic and tonal flexibility too. But the balance is not quite right, for the cello has been placed too close to a microphone (and the piano too far away) as if the engineers feared it would be swamped: some of its accompanimental figuration in ''Cortege'' and ''Menuet'' is too loud and one notices the same imbalance in the exchanges at the start of the latter. The Sonata seems to have a better positioning, but there is still something oddly covered about the piano sound while the cello lacks a true hushed pianissimo. Otherwise, strongly expressive playing from both artists makes this a satisfying performance, and predictably the central ''Serenade'' has both fantasy and tension.
Faure's famous Elegie is played at a slightly slower tempo than usual, but effectively, with all the emotional stops pulled out. With the Kodaly Sonatina, a one-movement work from the 1920s that the composer left unpublished for over 30 years, both players are on home territory, and though it offers more gestures than substance it receives a dedicated performance. So does the melodious, folk-inspired Bartok Rhapsody, played with a gusto and innate understanding that make this last piece on the programme also the best.'