The oom pah figuration that launches Bartók’s Suite, Op 4 – which he arranged for two pianos in 1941 from his original 1907 orchestral version – gets briefly overlaid with a digital squeak here, and throughout this survey of Bartók and his music for two pianos, the booming magnificence of these sonic walks into the unknown are never quite captured as faithfully as you’d like. Loud dynamics mean smudgy textures and the recorded sound feels needlessly impersonal and functional.

Which is a pity, because the Italian pianists Matteo Fossi and Marco Gaggini (best known for their two-piano recording of the Brahms symphonies) play like a dream. The opening of The Miraculous Mandarin sounds paradoxically more orchestral than the orchestral version – if by ‘orchestral’ you mean clearly delineated layers of sound that congeal into a complex whole. True enough, with the introductions made and Bartók defaulting towards utilitarian tremolos to carry the action, colouristic and dramatic impetus is lost as nuts-and-bolts harmonic engineering begins to overwhelm the actual music. But the accumulated impact of that introduction is heady stuff indeed. Criss-crossing lines in freefalling chromaticism disorientate your senses like those looming spirals typical of a Hitchcock staircase. The chase sequence works especially well too, the clarity of pianos giving Bartók’s fugue an intensely etched presence. But moving to the second disc, away from transcribed orchestral music towards notes specifically designed for their instrument, comes as a relief.

Not that everything in the garden is rosy. The Sonata for two pianos and percussion gets a cautious if undeniably meticulous performance. The spacious second movement has moments of spooked beauty as percussionists Federico Poli and Gianni Giangrasso craft true sound-art out of Bartók’s fastidious instructions about precisely where to place sticks and beaters on snare drums and cymbals. But the dynamic perspective of the first movement is compromised by the pinched recording, and the finale is dogged by its sluggish tempo and glaringly out-of-tune xylophone. By the time you reach the seven short pieces from Mikrokosmos you realise that this in fact was the only dedicated music Bartók wrote for two pianos, with the last of them, ‘Ostinato’, echoing the finale of Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta; the filler, Ligeti’s Three Pieces, feels very much at home in the world of Bartók as clouds of micropolyphony float between these two generations of Hungarian masters.