With musical elder-statesmanship comes the opportunity to revisit past repertoire and make new, potentially definitive records of one’s interpretations. Martha Argerich, with her longtime friend and duet-partner Nelson Freire, does just that, offering a disc of her two-piano party pieces. The Ravel she has already recorded with Freire, back in 1982; the Rachmaninov with Nicolas Economou the following year; and the Brahms with Polina Leschenko at Lugano in 2005. She’s also recorded all three works with Alexandre Rabinovitch at various times for Teldec. Comparisons, though, are somewhat otiose as these are, like all of Argerich’s music-making, performances in and of themselves, alive in the moment of creation. She delights nowadays in surrounding herself with like-minded chamber collaborators, challenging them (and herself) to ever greater feats of technique and expression.

How many times have we all heard two-piano performances of the Brahms St Antoni Variations that open with the players out of sync, making it sound like a child’s piano lesson? Argerich and Freire naturally, effortlessly put such solecisms to flight: as the slightly star-struck annotator writes, they “trust in their ears – and in the inner pulse of the music, in their shared delight in music-making and in the spark that passes between them”. After this chaste, almost didactic opening, the ensuing variations surge, muse, scamper; in the Poco presto variations we appreciate why Schoenberg admired Brahms so deeply; the pregnancy of the coda builds inexorably to its triumphant catharsis.

Rachmaninov’s own virtuoso transcription of his Symphonic Dances (in which the players swap roles, so Freire takes the top line) demonstrates that two pianos can be (almost) as versatile as a romantic-size orchestra: of course, the full palette of woodwind colours is not available even to the 176-key two-Steinway behemoth; but Freire and Argerich tint and shade the music with the skill of a master orchestrator. The Symphonic Dances’ ghostly waltz finds its image amplified and refracted in Ravel’s nightmare scenario (Argerich on top once more), a thunderous climax to proceedings, echoed in the (hitherto preternaturally quiet) audience’s explosive applause.

Providing repose among these three concert pieces is Schubert’s very late (June 1828) Grand Rondeau in A major, for which the two players nuzzle up on one piano. Once again, in music that can sound dry and four-square in the wrong hands, Freire (primo) and Argerich show that theirs are indubitably the right hands, giving this characteristically modest but expansive piece expressive shape and structure, and in the process shaving almost two minutes off the equally recommendable 1978 performance by Christoph Eschenbach and Justus Frantz.

This is a souvenir of what must have been a special evening at the Grosses Festspielhaus; but it’s also so much more than that. To hear two musicians of this stature at the height of their re-creative powers is never less than thrilling and thought-provoking, and gratitude is due to DG for thinking to travel down from Hamburg with their microphones to capture the event in such realistic sound.