Younger readers should perhaps be reminded of the international reputation long enjoyed by Cyril Smith and Phyllis Sellick as a two-piano duo, a partnership they courageously continued with three hands after Smith lost the use of his left arm. All five works were recorded in July 1974, only a month before his sudden death at the age of 66, though only the Franck, Mendelssohn and Faure found a place when the LP first appeared in 1981.
Strangely, the CD booklet doesn't tell us who arranged Schubert's Fantasie and B flat Sonata for them. In the sonata (written during a Hungarian sojourn when Schubert was only 21) you'd hardly guess any arrangement had been necessary at all. In both works I enjoyed the players' immediate response to the mood of the moment and the time they allow themselves to savour everything to the full. But pursuit of expression, manifest in frequent yieldings of pulse, does sometimes disrupt the music's longer flow—as notably in the plaintive recurrent theme in the Fantasie and even the opening subject of the Sonata's first movement. As sound per se, I was not too seriously worried about the reverberant recording venue until a few thicker swellings in the Fantasie's final fugato, likewise one or two clangier outbursts in the Sonata's concluding Allegretto.
Of the three reissued works, by far the most winning is Faure's Dolly, chiefly because of its simpler textures needing only minimal adjustment for three hands. Here their tonal translucency, coupled with intimately tender phrasing, makes it as recommendable as any of the catalogue's four-handed versions. Mendelssohn's brilliant Allegro and Franck's equally characteristic Prelude, Choral et Fugue (both arranged by John Odom) bring further reminders of these artists' very closely attuned ensemble. Nevertheless, I did find myself questioning their unusually slow tempo for Franck's opening Prelude, and one or two moments of less than perfect balance such as in sufficient top in the Choral and the first entry of the chorale tune itself and also the lead into the Fugue. But how much that extra hand helps in disentangling thematic strands as excitement mounts towards the end.'