John and Fiona York, Wigmore Hall, London

Any orchestral manager who planned a concert comprising Holst's suite The Planets (50 minutes), followed, after the interval, by The Rite of Spring (32 minutes) of Stravinsky and Debussy's La mer (23 minutes), would likely have an orchestral strike on his hands - led by the brass, fearful for wear and tear on their lips (not to mention their hearing).

Any orchestral manager who planned a concert comprising Holst's suite The Planets (50 minutes), followed, after the interval, by The Rite of Spring (32 minutes) of Stravinsky and Debussy's La mer (23 minutes), would likely have an orchestral strike on his hands - led by the brass, fearful for wear and tear on their lips (not to mention their hearing).

As transcribed for four hands at one keyboard in this Wigmore Hall programme, the demands on concentration and stamina evidently still posed a formidable challenge even to so versatile an artist as John York, celebrating the 30th anniversary of his Wigmore Hall debut with his wife and duo partner Fiona York. Yet no less engrossing was the fact that all three transcriptions were made by their own composers.

Or were they transcriptions? From a time when piano versions of orchestral works played a far more vital role in getting the music around than the still-nascent record industry, there survives plenty of evidence of composers sketching works in piano duo or two-piano layout during, or even before, scoring them up. We know that several movements of The Planets were tried out in this form in Holst's music room at St Paul's Girls School as soon as he completed them, and that Stravinsky and Debussy read through the already published duo version of The Rite before the riotous ballet premiere.

Holst's published duo version - more or less forgotten until the Yorks revived it - neatly illustrated how the loss of colour in this "black and white" medium is often offset by a clarification of structure. If the fleeting lightness of the strings in "Mercury" or the mystic voices at the end of "Neptune" proved beyond the capacity of the piano to capture, the boldly systematic chord-building of "Mars" and the textural layering of "Saturn" were the more evident.

This was perhaps the most successful of the three performances. Stravinsky's Rite certainly sounded visceral enough, and the polymetric structure of the "Cortège of the Sage" came over as it almost never does in orchestral performance. But not all the chunkier chords were executed with quite the balance and crispness one imagines Stravinsky would have wanted, and there were patches of jangle where fingers (understandably) seemed to be tiring.

Debussy's three symphonic sketches had their sketchy moments of execution, too - though catching the volatile spirit of a work so full of tremulous airiness in pianistic terms seems to have taxed the composer himself as much as these players. The middle movement was the least effective as transcription and as performance, failing quite to surge and climax as it should, and only the final pages rose to the authentic ebullience. Yet this was enough to confirm the evening in its ambition, scope and sheer grit as something exceptional - duly exciting a prolonged ovation from its capacity audience.