The Carnegie Hall Concert

This is the kind of release that is fully worthy of a major label like RCA: two of today's top artists working at peak form, delivering the goods in a serious program of worthy repertoire. Schubert is one of the few composers whose range is wide enough to allow the creation of a rewarding evening devoted just to him, and his piano duos (here played on two pianos rather than by two pianists at one keyboard) live in a world all their own. Evgeny Kissin has done some of his best work in Schubert (the "Wanderer" Fantasy, for example), and James Levine, no slouch as a pianist himself, clearly loves this music as much as anyone. The program includes three of Schubert's very greatest works in the medium, all of them dating from the end of his brief life. The earliest is the Grand Duo, really a symphony that Schubert never got around to scoring (the most famous orchestral arrangement is Joachim's, and it deserves to be a repertory piece). Much of the writing is extremely orchestral in con