The other day a friend of mine in her 80s told me that she sees an old lady when she looks in the mirror yet she still feels like a 20-year-old inside. This came to mind listening to Philip Dukes and Peter Donohoe’s vigourous performance of Brahms’s F minor Sonata. There’s a tendency to treat Brahms’s Op 120 Sonatas in a wistful, elegiac manner – perfectly understandable, of course, given that these were his final chamber works – as Antoine Tamestit and Cédric Tiberghien did in their recent recording (Harmonia Mundi, 5/21). But youthful ardour is more fitting, perhaps, as William Primrose and Rudolf Firkušný demonstrated so memorably in their Capitol recording from the 1950s (now on Urania).

Dukes’s powerful tone, with its mixture of sweetness and sinew, reminds me of Primrose’s, in fact, and he puts it to good use in the surging phrases of the F minor Sonata’s opening Allegro appassionato. The chiselled clarity of Peter Donohoe’s playing proves an excellent foil for Dukes’s robust lyricism – listen at 5'02", for instance, where Brahms’s syncopations threaten to throw the piano part off course, but instead Donohoe’s firm grip turns these few bars into a brief adrenalin rush.

Dukes and Donohoe are more pliant, and aptly so, in the E flat major Sonata, though there are moments – as in the first bars, say – which seem to move beat by beat rather than in phrases. I’m more troubled, however, by the lack of quiet playing in both sonatas. The poco forte marking at the start of the First Sonata’s slow movement, for example, is given as a full-on forte. And in the finale of the Second Sonata, where the crescendos and diminuendos in the third variation (starting at 3'21") should all be within the parameters of the opening piano marking, Dukes and Donohoe get increasingly loud. There are exquisite moments, too, mind you – the final pages of the Second Sonata are ravishing – but I’d say that Michael Tree (one of Dukes’s teachers and to whom this recording is dedicated) and Richard Goode (Nonesuch) get much closer to the music’s wondrously variegated heart.

I have no quibbles whatsoever with Dukes and Donohoe’s fist-clenched account of the Scherzo from the FAE Sonata, however, and their reading of Schumann’s Adagio and Allegro (originally for horn and piano) has all the warmth and ardour one could wish for.