Ludmila Berlinskaya and Arthur Ancelle are a formidably well-equipped duo whose acquaintance I first made back in 2017 with their superb recording of Saint-Saëns’s arrangement for two pianos of Liszt’s B minor Sonata (Melodiya, 3/17). Here they turn their attention to five French composers in music that, if not about childhood itself, is imbued with ‘the rapturous ignorance of long ago, / The peace, before the dreadful daylight starts, / Of unkept promises and broken hearts’ (Betjeman). Four are rightfully evergreen favourites; the fifth, Feuille d’images by Louis Aubert (1877-1968), will be unfamiliar to most of us.

I can’t honestly say that this album, good as it is, has grabbed me in the same way as their earlier one, a principal reason being the recorded sound: everything is clinically clear but chillingly distant, the ff dynamic sometimes unpleasantly clangorous (try the last part of the Aubert) in a recording studio which, I imagine, is spacious and has a wooden floor and no baffles. It must have been all but impossible not to pick up some pedal action. The whole effect is to hold you at arm’s length.

It goes without saying that the duo’s ensemble precision is second to none. Their characterisation of each piece is as witty, charming or spirited as need be, but I remained, while admiring, uninvolved. The team’s most compelling rivals in the Fauré, Debussy and Ravel suites are Paul Lewis and Steven Osborne (Hyperion, 4/21) – stiff competition indeed, shortlisted as they were for a Gramophone Award. Their recorded sound, likewise, veers towards the chilly, but the playing has an extra refinement. Compare how the Hyperion pair phrase the opening of the ‘Berceuse’ (Dolly) with Berlinskaya and Ancelle, their suave ‘En bateau’ (Debussy) and the repose they find in ‘Le jardin féerique’ (Ravel).

That marginal superiority notwithstanding, the Alpha disc is well worth considering for, though not the first time that the Bizet, Fauré, Debussy and Ravel pieces have appeared on the same album, they do so surprisingly infrequently – and none has the enchanting Aubert suite, composed in 1930 and, like Ma Mère l’Oye, in five short movements. Aubert, the dedicatee of Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales (he also gave the first performance), proves well qualified to share the honours with his better-known confrères and his suite should be, like the others, standard duo fare.