The year 1902 had no CDs or DVDs, but it did have arrangers. Into them music publishers poured symphonies, operas, string quartets and oratorios, all to be ground to a consistency suitable for parlor piano.

Monday night’s parlor was the tiny performing space at the Austrian Cultural Forum, where Dennis Russell Davies and Maki Namekawa played Alexander Zemlinsky’s four-hand version of Beethoven ’s “Fidelio.” They did so in extroverted and very public fashion, although the intent of Universal Edition, the Viennese publishing house, was surely different.

Zemlinsky — who with his brother-in-law Arnold Schoenberg did a number of opera reductions for Universal — was making money but also offering amateurs at least the bone structure of Beethoven’s only opera. On second thought, “amateur” may not be the right word, for here Zemlinsky has written complicated parts suited to nonprofessionals of the highest order or, better, professionals of great energy and settled skills. He had two of those professionals on Monday.

Once past Schubert’s great duos and estimable pieces by Mozart and Brahms, the remaining repertory for two pianists at one piano is overwhelmingly practical in nature. Publishers thrived on arrangements: piano sonatas turned into woodwind quintets or woodwind quintets turned into piano sonatas. People with enough piano lessons behind them, and with the nearest orchestra 100 miles away, could stay at home and learn Haydn by clattering away at his symphonies on their own.