★★★☆☆

German composers don’t know how to have fun. Think no further than Mozart’s Musical Joke, or Beethoven’s fat-shaming of the violinist Schuppanzigh.  Not funny at all. Not to mention Schumann and Brahms, or the feeble anti-critic jokes made by Wagner, Mahler and Richard Strauss.

So it was in a wary frame of mind that I approached a frisky album of unknown pieces for multiple pianos and orchestra by Mendelssohn, Moscheles, Schubert and Liszt. Four-hand is where musicians share in-jokes. Was it a fun hour? Actually, not far from it.

The first piece, by Mendelssohn and his pal Ignaz Moscheles, was written for a London charity gala, and you can imagine what they are like, all black tie and décolletée. The work takes a theme by the deadly serious Carl Maria von Weber and turns it into a party game, a kind of musical chairs for idle composers. When the theme wears out, the comedy duo play little riffs around the inability of constipated Germans ever to finish a piece. A Grand Duo by Moscheles, written all on his own, shows why his mighty reputation died about ten minutes after he did.

Franz Liszt, probably the greatest musical propagator the world has ever known, fell in love with Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy for solo piano and turned it into a version for piano and orchestra. The Israeli pianist Alexander Tamir made that two pianos and orchestra. Well worth the effort, full of musicality and unexpected asides. A 19^th century chap called Ernest Pauer turned two marches by Schubert into an eight-hand piano suite. It must clatter unbearably on stage, but with volume control in your living room works rather nicely.

The pianists involved in this album are members of the Israeli Multipiano ensemble. Their showstopper on tour is Holst’s Planets for pianos and percussion. Now that I’d like to hear.