The Rite of Spring is the only one of Stravinsky’s four Russian ballets that contains no part for piano and, ironically, the only one of which the composer subsequently made a piano duet arrangement. Though the otherwise informative booklet does not say so, Anderson and Siprashvili play this version on two pianos (the published score has an inscription which seems to indicate Stravinsky’s sanction for its dual usage) ‘redistributing the hands’, so I am told, ‘quite extensively (maybe in total about a third of the work)’. The spirited and attentive husband-and-wife team play most persuasively, though not enough to allow one to temporarily dismiss the aural memory of the original in the more ferocious sections (‘Augurs of Spring’, for example, and ‘Glorification of the Chosen One’), the slower dances providing the most effective passages.

While the relatively uniform timbre of the two pianos emphasises the harmonic complexity of The Rite, offering a stimulating alternative perspective, Tim Seddon’s new arrangement of Pictures, like Saint-Saëns’s two-piano version of Chopin’s Funeral Sonata, is an interesting exercise but adds little to the original except doublings of octaves and a few stray comments. The lumbering ‘Bydlo’ makes its appearance well-oiled and at ff – there is no sense of a journey – typical of the somewhat routine characterisation of the 10 pictures. But if you are keen to hear these works played on two pianos, this is the only recording of them and as such is well worth investigating. The recorded sound (Moscow Conservatoire’s Grand Hall) is warm and realistic.