The heyday of piano ensemble transcriptions from orchestral and operatic scores more or less coincided with the height of Richard Wagner’s popularity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As a result, numerous arrangers recast Wagner opera scenes and overtures for two pianos, none more ambitiously than Hermann Behn (1859-1927), a Hamburg-based, Bruckner-trained composer responsible for a once-popular collection called 50 Symphonic Movements from Richard Wagner’s Musical Dramas.

The first instalment of Cord Garben and Thomas Hoppe’s ‘The Ring Pianos Project’ offers the premiere recordings of ‘bleeding chunks’ from Das Rheingold and Die Walküre. Although the uniformity of the pianos’ sonorities sometimes obscures the relationships between vocal lines and orchestral accompaniment (the Giants’ first appearance in Das Rheingold, Brünnhilde’s high C swoops at the outset of Act 2 of Die Walküre), Behn truly shines when orchestral textures are massive and thick (Das Rheingold’s final pages) or mostly decorative (the Ride of the Valkyries’ swirling scales, the Magic Fire Music’s cascading effects). At the same time, the simpler, more transparent keyboard-writing characterising the confrontation between Brünnhilde and Siegmund in Act 2 of Die Walküre finds the Garben/Hoppe duo at their most sensitive and refined from the standpoint of tone colour and ensemble exactitude. Just be aware of the high-handed, self-serving and pretentious booklet-notes.

By contrast, Yaara Tal and Andreas Groethuysen offer a wide variety of arrangers and altogether suppler, more finely calibrated duo pianism. The Flying Dutchman Overture in Debussy’s arrangement and Reger’s slightly upholstered Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde have never sounded so assured, lithe and well balanced on disc. Similarly, Dukas’s treatment of the Tannhäuser Bacchanal stands out for the duo’s suave rapid passagework and eloquent long lines. From Gotterdämmerung we hear Siegfried’s Death and Funeral March and the Immolation Scene in two skilfully wrought, previously unrecorded arrangements by the noted mathematician Alfred Pringsheim, who was Thomas Mann’s father-in-law. Tal and Groethuysen achieve remarkable synchronicity in the way they interweave the vocal lines and elaborate multi-motif orchestral frameworks in perfect perspective, while shaping the inevitable tremolos with appreciable textural and dynamic variety. Moreover, Egon Voss’s annotations couldn’t be more informative, clear and concise.