Labeques Bring High-Level Pianism to Pavilion

The high-achieving duo-piano team of Katia and Marielle Labeque returned to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Tuesday night to play a serious and engaging recital.

Out of their eclectic repertory, the sisters offered a surprisingly conservative Mozart/Debussy/ Tchaikovsky program. What wasn’t surprising was the level of their musicality and their pointed interpretive insights.

The high point of their agenda turned out to be the two Mozart sonatas that opened the recital: the one in F, for four hands at one piano, K. 497, and the two-piano work in D, K. 448.

The Labeques specialize in Mozart, the most exposing and difficult of masters. These performances--except for some negligible moments in the slow movement of K. 497, when the Hamburg Steinway became particularly hard-edged in sound--proved their expertise. They beautifully served up the composer’s wide emotional range, bubbly energy and exquisite lyricism.

After intermission, a program change brought the novelty of Ravel’s transcription of two of Debussy’s “Trois Nocturnes”: “Nuages and “Fe^tes,” which the Labeques played handsomely, with velvet tone and resourceful pianism.

After displaying more technical fireworks in Tchaikovsky’s four-hand setting of his “Capriccio Italien,” the sisters offered Michel Camilo’s jazzy “On Fire,” in another blaze of virtuosity.