The black-and-white cover photo of Pizarro and Troncanetti seems to say ‘couple of guys who like to have fun’. Pizarro (b1968, Lisbon) and Troncanetti (b1991, Siena) have known each other for a decade but only made their debut as a piano duo last December. Their first album is handsomely presented, with unfamiliar pictures of Saint-Saëns and a genial booklet note from Robert Matthew-Walker. But what of the contents?

The very first bars of Le rouet d’Omphale draw you in with the silky, cultivated piano tone of both players. Both pianos – a 1924 Bechstein Model B and a 1925 New York Steinway Model B – are in perfect accord, captured in the warm, slightly boxy acoustic of the Piano Restorations studio in Twyford, Buckinghamshire (Michael Ponder producer, engineer and editor). This is one of the finest accounts I have heard of Saint-Saëns’s (original) two-piano version of his tone poem, though Martin Jones and Adrian Farmer, recorded in the more spacious Wyastone Concert Hall (2015), give them a run for their money.

I was not so taken with the Variations on a Theme of Beethoven, the one based on the Minuet from the Sonata No 18 in E flat, Op 31 No 3. Sensitive phrasing, clear textures, palpable affection for the music, yes, but where are the two guys who like to have fun? Everything is so cautious and staid – at least when your benchmark is the barnstorming 1950 account by Emil Gilels and Yakov Zak (incidentally nearly two minutes faster).

The remaining works are all given good, solid performances but lack that extra sparkle. Compare, for example, Pizarro and Troncanetti with another new release of Saint-Saëns’s music for two pianos from Jean-Michel Ferran and Alain Jacquon on the Maguelone label: nothing like as pleasing a piano tone but they manage, at roughly the same tempos, to inject panache into the Polonaise and find a more exotic element in the Caprice arabe. The Somm pair are most successful in the strange Scherzo, Op 87, written in the wake of the death of Saint-Saëns’s beloved mother. Even the composer wondered where some of the harmonies came from. At times you might think it was written by Satie.

Overall, it’s a lovely disc to listen to, but this talented pair should dig deeper to avoid everything becoming homogenised.