Here is a refreshingly entertaining disc from longtime piano partners Charles Owen and Katya Apekisheva, now also co-directors of the relatively young London Piano Festival. Apart from the Ravel arrangements of Debussy’s Nocturnes, themselves not exactly rarities, there is nothing particularly new in their choice of repertoire (especially given that so many recordings of Poulenc’s Two-Piano Concerto opt for fillers from his two-piano oeuvre). In compensation, they bring abundant joie de vivre and athleticism to bear on this mainly lowbrow music (again Debussy is the exception to that characterisation).

The opening of Milhaud’s Scaramouche is appropriately silly and frothy, and there is plenty to enjoy in Owen and Apekisheva’s no-nonsense yet idiomatic, tightly synchronised and subtly flexible pianism. For a higher dose of manic energy, check out the dynamic duo of Kissin/Argerich live, and for more probing into the hidden poetry of the work, try the Labèque sisters.

Poulenc’s sonatas somehow manage to sound constantly fresh and new despite their huge indebtedness to Stravinsky (in these cases most conspicuously The Rite and Les noces). There are even occasional foreshadowings of Messiaen’s celestial universe, not least in the Élégie. Though Owen and Apekisheva offer plenty of the requisite dash and spirit, they also faithfully channel the raw primitivism that undercuts Poulenc’s urbane facade, and they keep admirably straight faces even when he leers and grimaces at them. At times, especially in the Two-Piano Sonata, I did wonder if their sound isn’t a little too brassy and harsh for the music’s good, their rhythms a fraction too unyielding. And a greater sense of colour and shape would surely make a stronger case for Debussy’s Nocturnes – not the finest of Ravel’s arrangements, it might be thought – as a comparison with the first two of them from Kissin and Argerich reveals.