His commanding technique and probing intellect make pianist Yefim Bronfman your go-to man for a program as varied and challenging as this one. He'll do Haydn's Piano Sonata in C, the exhilarating run through almost bizarrely emotional terrain that's like a survey in the history of counterpoint, lyrical/dissonant schizophrenia and athletic pedal effects — and it's all crammed into three minutes. Esa-Pekka Salonen's Humoreske gets its world premiere tonight; we assume that his humors refer in the original sense to those of the body once thought to determine a person's physical and mental states, as does William Schumann's Humoreske in B-flat, which also gets a look. Bronfman, if he survives (he will), then tackles the rolling, roiling Chopin Twelve Etudes, “formal exercises” with a highly informal, feral ferocity of audacious harmonies and burning fingerwork.

Wed., March 9, 2011

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