Incredibly, it took until 2016 for any two-piano team to make a commercial recording of Saint Saëns’s superb arrangement of Liszt’s B minor Sonata. I was lucky enough to welcome it in these pages played by Ludmila Berlinskaya and Arthur Ancelle. Now, like the number six bus, another has arrived, again courtesy of a husband-and-wife team and, as on the Melodiya disc, coupled with some other highly desirable repertoire.

Saint Saëns is entirely faithful to Liszt’s original – a translation rather than an elaboration – but distributing the material between four hands and feet does not ipso facto give the two players an easier time surmounting the myriad musical and technical challenges of the original solo. However, it is partly the handling of these very difficulties that makes a solo performance such a compelling experience and the playing of the newcomers, while very fine and with an attractive, soft-grained tone, does not convey the thrill of the work in the same way as the Russian duo, where primo and secondo are better focused and less inclined to put the brakes on.

This slight politesse of approach is also present in the Introduction and Rondo capriccioso, an unashamed showpiece for the violin which loses its raison d’être if it fails to thrill. It all sounds lovely in the hands of Silver and Garburg but only truly lifts off the page in the excitingly dispatched coda, having got past an unwarranted pause at fig E (6'29") that sounds suspiciously like a missed edit. Daniel Blumenthal and Robert Groslot on their early Marco Polo recording (1993) dazzle and delight to a far greater degree, despite their coarser piano sound.

The most consistently successful title on the new disc is Debussy’s arrangement of Schumann’s Six Canonic Studies for pedal piano, the best known of which (No 5, Nicht zu schnell) is given an enjoyably jaunty airing and, as with the other five, is somehow made more convincing by the Israeli duo and better suited to this medium than in its more usual guise on the organ. A well-recorded disc. Good booklet. Handsomely presented.