All too often we regard piano duets as somewhat childish pleasures but there’s nothing emotionally juvenile about any of the music on offer here. The two pianists sharing a piano stool embody the best of the French tradition – crystalline tone, pristine fingerwork and clarity of thought – and they make a compelling partnership. Their reading of Fauré’s famous Dolly suite is utterly unsentimental and all the better for it, be it in the warmly confiding ‘Le jardin de Dolly’ or the ebullient Spanishries of the final number, in which they make light work of the tricky co-ordination between four hands.

Similarly, there’s strong characterisation in each of the 12 miniatures that make up Bizet’s Jeux d’enfants, be it the proudly galumphing hobby-horses (‘Les chevaux de bois’), the earnestly marching ‘Trompette et tambour’, what is patently a very boisterous game of leapfrog (‘Saute-mouton’) or the uproarious final ‘Le bal’ (‘The Ball’), the party sounding as if it has got rather out of hand. But equally fine are the more introverted moments, not least the loving duet between husband and wife (‘Petit mari, petite femme’), while ‘Les bulles de savon’ (‘Soap bubbles’) seems almost a forerunner of Prokofiev’s Visions fugitives in its gawky melodic contours and obsessive rhythms. Again, in Debussy’s youthful Petite suite, Désert and Strosser veer well away from undue sugariness, their ‘En bateau’ more poised than that of Pascal and Ami Rogé, who sound a little more arch in ‘Cortège’. The ‘Menuet’ on the new disc is particularly alluring.

If there are any reservations, then they involve the Ravel, which some might find a degree too cool, particularly the opening ‘Pavane’. In ‘Petit Poucet’ (‘Tom Thumb’) the tinkling interjections at the top of the keyboard around two-thirds of the way in are so subtle as to be almost inaudible, and the haughty Empress Laideronnette could perhaps let her hair down a little more, as the writing itself seems to suggest. But the remaining two pieces work well, ‘Le jardin féerique’ providing a suitably magical envoi to a scintillating disc.