In an absorbing booklet essay, Peter Hill encourages us to take seriously Beethoven’s modest output for piano duet as a microcosmic journey through the composer’s maturation. Arranged here in chronological order, it sets out in unassuming fashion with the two-movement, six-minute Sonata likely written for the 20-something teacher to play with his pupils. Even at this early stage in his career, however, Beethoven understood how to sidestep the genre’s pitfalls that make countless similar pieces more fun for players than listeners.

Hill and his longstanding duet partner Benjamin Frith understand them, too. Whichever of them plays secondo – in the session photograph above it’s Frith, but they could well swap between pieces, and the booklet doesn’t say – keeps the bass parts well defined and lightly articulated. Even so, I am not persuaded that Beethoven’s pair of variation sets are elevated above countless contemporary similar pieces except in the stealthy harmonies and access to some briefly glimpsed Elysium in the finale of the 21-year-old composer’s variations on an undistinguished theme by Count Waldstein, just eight years his elder and among his earliest patrons.

Not even Hill and Frith’s sprightly tempos and nicely clipped, Prussian phrasing can quite rescue the Three Marches, Op 45, either, from the fault of going round and round and round that Schubert would in time turn into a virtue in otherwise strikingly similar works such as the three Marches heroïques, D602, with much more lyrical secondary themes. Inevitably, nothing among these occasional works really prepares the listener for the impact of the Grosse Fuge, which in its piano duet form sounds less like a reduction of the string quartet and more of a privately set challenge to outstrip the Wanderer Fantasy (composed four years earlier) in devising the most ambitious and various contrapuntal textures possible within the confines of a single keyboard.

Beethoven’s own arrangement has been marginally tweaked by Hill and Frith to avoid ‘gridlock’ (Hill’s term), and their performance holds exhilaration and astringence in balance with remarkable success. By contrast, Takahashi and Lehmann (Audite) underscore an element of caprice that may occasionally be encountered in quartet performances, and the work’s qualities of unhinged invention are pushed thrillingly to the limits of sense by Amy and Sara Hamann on the only available recording with fortepiano (and also piano – a release on the Grand Piano label that presents the only serious rival to this one). To listen to Hill and Frith, as much as to The Lindsays – perhaps tellingly, the recording is dedicated to the memory of Peter Cropper – is to grasp afresh why 19th-century commentators had problems thinking of the Grosse Fuge as music at all.