Before radio and recordings came along it was more-or-less standard practice to make orchestral works available in four-hand piano arrangements for home use. Publishing companies usually employed house arrangers for this purpose, although certain composers took on the task themselves, which is the case for at least two of the orchestral works “de-orchestrated” here. Because Scheherazade, Pacific 231, and Boléro are nothing less than orchestral showpieces that exploit timbre and instrumental color to the hilt, hearing them on piano is not unlike reducing a gorgeous, three-dimensional colorful landscape to the flat confines of a black-and-white picture postcard.
That’s certainly the case in the Piano Duo Trenkner-Speidel’s heavy-handed, foursquare rendition of all four Scheherazade movements. Don’t blame the instrument, for the arabesques in the violin solos potentially can sound just as supple and feathery on the piano, as can the silken third-movement clarinet runs. On the other hand, Honegger’s motoric climaxes sound full-bodied and well-defined in keyboard terms, while Ravel ensures textural variety by way of his masterful deployment of registers and note doublings, even though here the music’s sultry subtext takes a back seat to the Duo’s steady sobriety and strong rhythmic concentration. However, the players miscalculate by underlining the modulation from C major to E major toward the end with a small yet slightly gauche ritard that softens the musical build. At the very least, transcription mavens ought to know about this disc.
