I've been enjoying this rather odd disc. It's another Naxos, this time of Brahms chamber music for strings, but re-arranged (by Brahms himself) for two people to play on one piano.

Time was when this was how musically educated people typically enjoyed their music. Untypically, they would hear the occasional concert with a symphony orchestra and a famous conductor. But that was very rare. Meanwhile, the family hi-fi was the piano, played by one of them. With others joining in with singing or on other instruments.

Four handed piano arrangements of pieces that only an orchestra could do real justice to, or, as in this case, only expert string players, were thus, before real hi-fi, a staple of the music business. And such is the state of the music business now that it makes as much sense to do the first or second recording of a couple of these four-handed piano reductions as it would to do yet another recording of the real things.

The particular CD I've been listening to is of Brahms String Quartet opus 67 and of his String Quintet opus 88, played on the one piano by Silke-Thora Matthies and Christian Köhn. Are they, like so many of the people that this music was first re-arranged for, a husband-and-wife team? I don't know, but they have been playing this kind of music together since 1988.

As I said, I've been enjoying this disc, but not quite as much as I had hoped to.

To my ear, there is just a tad too much of the feeling that these people are not so much playing this music, as playing through it. In the quicker and rhythmically strong bits, it sounds find. But in the slower bits, you really miss those long legato lines, and it sounds not so much like a performance as like a run-through. The long lines of the piece, instead of flying slowly forward like hovering birds, snap apart into disjointed little tinkles and fall to the floor. Thus it is that, in the slow bits, it sounds that fatal little bit like expert sight reading. What I heard was two musicians contentedly and expertly acquainting themselves with the facts concerning what the notes are. What I wanted to hear was a true performance.

It sounded to me, in other words, much as it must have sounded when this music was first played, by its first customers.

I would really love to listen to a disc of two of the following doing this kind of music: Murray Perahia, Radu Lupu, Andras Schiff, Mitsuko Uchida, Alan Schiller, or maybe Evgeny Kissin. Or: try Benjamin Britten and Sviatoslav Richter. This music, arranged this way, needs people to play it who are better than it is. You need pianists who can dust onto it that bit of magic that expert string players routinely bring to this music. It needs pianists who can caress magic out of a keyboard. Matthies and Kohn are, for me, just that tiny little bit earthbound.

I want to qualify this strongly. Matthies and Köhn are excellent pianists. All I'm saying is, they aren't quite at the very top of the tree, and that their performances of this music made me want to hear it played by a couple of pianists who are. I can imagine many listeners singling this disc out for possessing the very quality that, for me, it didn't quite possess. For many listeners, this CD might have just the magic which, for me, it didn't have.

I bought the CD - second hand and for even less than the Naxos price of £5 - to hear what this stuff sounds like, and to get to know these pieces (two of my very favourites) that little bit better, by hearing them dressed differently, as it were. This I definitely succeeded in doing.