Before recorded sound, piano transcriptions of symphonic literature served various purposes. Highly skilled amateurs, and there were many, might study them for their own edification or that of their nearest and dearest. Public virtuosi could make a splash with them before audiences whose access to full-court-press performances (never mind good full-court-press performances) was rare to nonexistent. For a contemporary artist like Igor Levit, the appeal may lie in the opportunity to engage with towering masterpieces that unhappily don’t involve his instrument. He opens his latest Carnegie Hall recital with an arrangement of the Adagio from Mahler’s unfinished Symphony No. 10 and culminates in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, the “Eroica,” as adapted by Franz Liszt, a tour de force by any measure. In between, there’s Hindemith’s knucklebuster Suite “1922,” a bona fide piano original once championed by Sviatoslav Richter. —Matthew Gurewitsch