In many ways, Xaver Scharwenka’s piano duet transcriptions of Beethoven’s symphonies stand out from numerous others by such 19th-century ‘in house’ arrangers as Selmar Bagge, Hugo Ulrich and Wilhelm Meves. His textural decisions in regard to octave doublings, registration and deployment of tremolos avoid clutter and aural fatigue, creating effective and stylish contrasts between sonorous heft and transparent delicacy. What is more, the physical logic of Scharwenka’s keyboard layout ensures minimum awkwardness and maximum impact, transforming these works into plausible four-hand sonatas where one hardly misses Beethoven’s felicities of orchestration.

Vol 4 may be the best instalment yet in the Uys and Schoeman piano duo’s Beethoven/Scharwenka cycle. Their incisive thematic interplay and judicious balancing of lyricism and brio throughout the First Symphony evoke the cantabile flexibility and opera buffa qualities typifying Toscanini’s 1930s BBC and NBC performances. The duo generate palpable tension in the Scherzo through careful accentuation and attention to Beethoven’s subito dynamics, which gives the illusion of pressing ahead, even though the basic tempo is not particularly swift. Perhaps their relatively fast pacing of the first and fourth movements’ slow introductions is to compensate for the piano’s limited sustain in relation to the orchestra.

On the other hand, Beethoven’s orchestral soundscape loses nothing in translation via the duo’s vibrant and robust performance of the Pastoral Symphony. The first movement’s warmly inflected trills and full-bodied cello lines are cases in point, as are the mellifluously voiced repeated chords assigned to the horns, plus détaché articulation that is rounded rather than spiky. The ‘Scene by the Brook’ comes alive with vividly characterised contrapuntal detail that sometimes goes for nothing in orchestral performances. The ‘Peasants’ Merrymaking’ Scherzo features a particularly boisterous Trio, replete with hard-hitting droning fifths in the bass. I would have anticipated a relentlessly speedy ‘Storm’ in context, yet the duo’s granitic deliberation yields a cumulative force on the scale of Otto Klemperer’s extraordinary live 1964 Berlin Philharmonic recording (Testament, A/03). The ‘Shepherd’s Song’ after the storm continues in a rather terse and businesslike vein, missing some of the tenderness and repose that one often expects in this movement. As an encore, the players offer Busoni’s two-piano transformation of the finale from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 19 in F, K459. Their reading sounds heavy-handed and foursquare when compared alongside to the lither and more crisply energised Anderson and Roe recording (Steinway & Sons, 5/14). Still, the duo’s remarkable ensemble synchronicity and fervent commitment in the Beethoven/Scharwenka works deserves my highest recommendation and I look forward to further volumes.