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This is sensational: two of the world’s greatest pianists coming together for a seemingly spontaneous joint recital that hits dizzy heights of excitement. Not everything is perfect: Stravinsky’s own piano duet version of The Rite of Spring is done on two pianos, which makes it marginally easier to play but creates tricky moments of ensemble: the Danse sacrale gets off to a very bumpy start. But can the adolescents’ dance ever have sounded more eloquent than under Barenboim’s fingers, or the spring rounds more hypnotic than Argerich makes them? Even in this seismically brutal music, neither of them ever makes an ugly sound, while in Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos, K448 and Schubert’s Variations on an Original Theme D81 3, their flexible, improvisatory approach lifts the music aloft.
