Wikipedia describes the Piano Duo Genova & Dimitrov as ‘a Bulgarian piano duo, considered both by the world music press and the audience one of the world’s finest and most successful young ensembles’. I wonder who wrote that…? Aglika Genova (b1971) and Liuben Dimitrov (b1969) have been playing together for 20 years and, in the UK at least, currently enjoy a very low profile: their only previous appearance in these pages was in November 2010 when I welcomed their performances of Mendelssohn’s early two-piano concertos.

The duo’s programme makes us, not for the first time, gawp in wonderment at Liszt’s industry. Here are but five of his works for two pianos, four of them (sometimes substantial) reworkings of earlier solo works, each page of every score black with notes. The most interesting, in one sense, is the Grand Concert Piece on Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words, the only piece here that has no equivalent solo version. It was written in 1834 but not given its premiere until 1984 (Richard and John Contiguglia). A flamboyant introduction leads to three linked treatments of Mendelssohn’s Op 19 Nos 1, 6 (the famous ‘Venetian Gondola’) and 3 (‘Hunting Song’), transforming their intimate originals into a fast-slow-fast mini-concerto. We should hear it more often. The duo play it with exactly the right exuberance and with flawless ensemble.

The same is true of the Concerto pathétique (a sort of rehearsal for the great B minor Sonata, with which it shares similar material) and the other more familiar works. With its significant divergences from the solo version, despite the redistribution of material, Liszt lets neither pianist off the hook in the Réminiscences de Don Juan, though the final pages lack the spine tingle generated inherently by the heroic solo version. The late (1870) two-piano heavily abridged version of Hexaméron is a curiosity but not a patch on the 1838 original, especially when Liszt includes only three of the variations (Thalberg’s, Czerny’s and his own): Hexaméron turned Ternion, you might say.