The piano duo is a medium for the pure enjoyment of music shared among friends: intimate, conversational, often illuminating, whether performing music written for the combination or other pieces which have been arranged for it. On this new Piano Classics album, a well-established Italian duo tackles familiar orchestral scores from Romantic-era Germany and Belle-Epoque Paris, finding connections and contrasts between them while conveying the sense of fun – making music for the sheer pleasure of it – that should always belong to a piano-duo performance.

At a time before recordings, and when many amateur music-lovers were not in a position to attend major orchestral or operatic events, transcriptions of new pieces served a significant purpose in disseminating the music and allowing it to be heard by the widest possible audience.

In that spirit, Franz Liszt arranged his tone-poem Les Préludes for piano duo, and the conductor and pianist Hans von Bülow transcribed the Tannhäuser Overture by Wagner.

What such transcriptions inevitably lose in grandeur and orchestral colour, they gain in illuminating familiar pieces from a new perspective: we hear into the texture of the music, alighting on buried harmonies and new facets of phrasing.

The two sets of waltzes by Ravel are more intrinsically pianistic; he wrote the Valses nobles et sentimentales for solo piano in 1911, and orchestrated them the following year. La Valse was designed as an orchestral ballet for Diaghilev, but Ravel wrote it at the piano as he did all his music.

These transcriptions for piano duo (four hands at one piano) were made at the time by Lucien Garban, and very much with Ravel’s approval; they kept up correspondence about the arrangements. With his insight into the composer’s mind, Garban elegantly disposes the delicate textures of both works across the four hands, making these pieces as satisfying to play as they are to hear.

Founded in 2013, the Spina-Benignetti Duo (Eleonora Spina and Michele Benignetti) has won awards at competitions in the US and Europe. They have given regular recitals ever since, and made several recordings: ‘Their ensemble is spot on, and there is a wonderful flow to the music under their fingers’ (American Record Guide).