The Labèque sisters offer a truly superlative account of the great F minor Fantasy in rich, warm-blooded sound. Rarely has the weft and warp of the score been so clearly yet spontaneously realised, its question-and-answer dialogue played with such perfect (and natural) even-handedness. As Malcolm Bilson and Robert D Levin observe in their booklet, with the fugato in the final section and the work’s climax that leads to the final restatement of the opening, “agony and resignation make no concession to the listener’s longing for release”. The Andantino varié in B minor is the delectable second movement of Schubert’s Divertissment sur des motifs origineaux [sic] français (no one seems to have identified these “original French motifs”).

The disc, all too short at 53 minutes, concludes with another masterpiece of the piano duo repertoire. Once more the interplay in Mozart’s D major Sonata is superbly handled, merrily witty in the outer movements and yielding an unusually elegiac Andante. One oddity: the opening phrase of the Rondo’s theme (in 2/4) consists of two groups of four semiquavers and one quaver; the Labèques play the first semiquaver as an appoggiatura and turn the second into a (accented) dotted quaver – unsettling.

The programme for Vol 5 of Naxos’s survey of Schubert’s complete piano music for four hands has Allan Schiller and John Humphreys in four of the five works for the medium composed during the summer of 1824 at Zseliz, the country home of Count Esterházy (the fifth work, Divertissement à la hongroise, appeared on Vol 1). When one considers that these include the mighty Grand Duo (43'35" in duration) and the Variations on an Original Theme (17'17"), it constitutes a fairly miraculous bout of creativity. Beautifully recorded at Hawksyard Priory in Staffordshire on a lovely-sounding Yamaha (which merits its own thanks from the performers in the booklet), this well filled disc is a useful collection, played with not a little affection and scrupulous attention to detail.