When played on two electric guitars, the Mother Goose suite sounds less like Ravel transcribed than an Ennio Morricone score for a spaghetti western. It’s the nature of the instruments. Take ‘Beauty and the Beast’ and the concluding ‘Le jardin féerique’ movements, for example. The sustained lyricism of both the original piano-duet scoring and Ravel’s orchestration simply gets lost in translation. On guitar, longer lines are demarcated by accents and shorter phrase groupings, plus timbral distinctions resulting from variations in strumming and fingerpicking.

This is particularly true in ‘Le jardin féerique’, where a necessarily slower tempo evokes horses crossing the American frontier rather than a thumb-sized boy getting the better of an ogre. However, guitarists Jack Petruzzelli and Cameron Greider circumvent such limitations through the clever use of harmonics, bluesy glissandos and other idiomatic devices.

In contrast, Bartók’s 44 Duos lose little when appropriated for two guitars. I like the musicians’ discreet manipulation of their volume controls to create the illusion of bowing in ‘Harvest Song’, or the way the ‘choking’ effect of their staccato articulation reasonably replicates Bartók’s directives in ‘Pizzicato’. This EP clearly proves that Petruzzelli and Greider aim to find the most musical solutions to technical challenges. A full-length CD release with all 44 Bartók Duos is in order!