Labeques Lavish Great Care on Schubert

One is tall; the other is short. One of them hums at the keyboard; the other stomps her left foot. They both fit the French stereotype: chic, slender, modishly dressed. Together, they are on the top echelon of international two-piano teams. They are the Labeques, sisters Katia and Marielle.

The pianists returned to Southern California on Wednesday night, to play a serious and delightful program at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts. It ended with a suite of songs from Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story,” played haphazardly but colorfully. It began, however, with appropriate care and affection lavished on a genuine masterpiece from Franz Schubert’s last year, the Fantasy in F minor.

The same work was played disappointingly last week in Costa Mesa by Ursula Oppens and Aki Takahashi. But in the Labeques’ hands, the Fantasy this time was all it could be: melancholy, heart-tugging, an inner struggle between pessimism and hopefulness, the composer’s songful, poetic monologue while facing death.

The Labeques brought all this work’s light and shadow into consideration, producing noble, detailed pianism specifying shades of feeling that words alone could not describe. Taken at the right slow tempos and sometimes flirting with inaudibility in terms of dynamics, this performance gave the Fantasy its due.

Continued melancholy, with the right mixture of more jolly emotions, marked the sisters’ playing of seven Hungarian Dances from Brahms’ collection of 21. These gems sound easy but are actually technically and musically highly complicated.

Ravel’s subtle, complex and irresistible “Mother Goose” Suite occupied the post-intermission part of the program, before Irwin Kostal’s flashy suite of “West Side Story” songs arranged for two pianos.