Yefim Bronfman at the Perelman

• Haydn’s Sonata in C, a mature work dating from 1794-95, is a late example of the classical style. It finds Haydn moving dexterously between the playful and the serious, but always within the decorum that defines the classical even when the envelope is being pushed a bit.
• Brahms’s Third Piano Sonata in F minor, Op. 5, is a major mid-Romantic statement — and, curiously, Brahms’s last essay in the form despite its early opus number — that offers the artist as heroic subject, not affirming personality as much as asserting it in its conflicted relation to itself and the world.
• Meanwhile, Prokofiev’s Sixth Sonata in A, Op. 82, composed in the shadow of modern war and political terrorism, has less to do with the self’s expression than its survival.

Bronfman was fully and elegantly in control of the Haydn, which pleased from first note to last. The music reflects the ebullience and underlying serenity of an artist at home in his own time and temperament. The world, Haydn knew, was changing with the century; the French Revolution was shaking old thrones, and the composer, free of the Esterházy livery, was making his own mark on a new bourgeois public. Haydn’s London symphonies, with their bolder reach, frankly engage the new age. His late sonatas, including this C major, are still entertainments for the salon: masterly but untroubling and, for us, balm from another time.

The ‘young eagle’

Brahms was only 20 when he completed his Third Sonata in October 1853. It was the longest composition he would ever write for solo piano, and, though an impressive work, it’s in some respects premature, for Brahms wasn’t yet the great architect who would emerge only four years later in the First Piano Concerto. Beethoven stands behind this youthful composition, and one hears Chopin, Schumann, and even Franz Liszt in it.

But Brahms puts on his own spurs, too, and the piece bears his unmistakable signature — the striding theme of the opening Allegro maestoso, the tenderness of the succeeding Andante espressivo, the ruminative waywardness of the subsequent scherzo and intermezzo movements, and the summative power of the rondo finale. It was very likely with this score in mind that Brahms’s mentor and patron, Schumann, hailed him publicly as a “young eagle” in the very month of its completion. This, indeed, was what was expected of the Romantic ego and what it expected of itself: to fly high, to follow its own path, and to stand alone.

If Bronfman didn’t fully knit the Sonata together for me, some of the loose ends were Brahms’s fault. Yet the F minor is a work of heroic ambition and a remarkable achievement for a composer barely out of his teens. If it’s infrequently performed, that’s at least in part because the Liszt B minor Piano Sonata soon eclipsed it. But there would be no more important piano sonatas added to the repertory than the Brahms Third and the Liszt for the next 40 years.

Stalin’s hammer

The Prokofiev Sixth Sonata, which closed the program, dates from 1939, a very bad year for most people. World War II began in Europe with the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland. In Russia, where a homesick Prokofiev had returned after concertizing in the West for a decade and a half, Stalin’s Great Terror continued to take its victims, among them the composer’s close friends and collaborators. Prokofiev had been commissioned to write a paean for Stalin’s 60th birthday, which he produced with gritted teeth. The Sixth Sonata was interrupted by this duty, but Prokofiev returned to complete it. It is one of the most extraordinary musical documents of the 20th century.

Set in four movements, the Sonata begins with a hammer-like theme, played in pounding chord clusters and even col pugno (with the fist). Prokofiev creates this brutal sound, but for me it unmistakably suggests the barbaric force of Stalinism — of totalitarianism tout court. The lyric second subject counterposed to it is all that remains of resistance, the soul at bay. The unequal struggle can have only one outcome, as this second theme slowly disintegrates before the onslaught of the first, leaving might alone in possession of the field.

The succeeding Allegretto takes a jerky, tottering theme through its paces, a marionette dancing on its strings. The slow, waltz-like third movement seems to search for a new level on which the self can reconstitute itself, but this too is swept away in the concluding Vivace, as the hammer theme of the first movement returns to bring the work to a concussive close.

Unexpected call

Normally, I don’t like to indulge extramusical descriptions, even when the composer provides a program. But I can’t hear the Sixth Sonata without feeling the brunt of the Soviet tragedy. Stalin’s thought police certainly heard something they didn’t like in it because they banned its performance several years later.

Ignat Solzhenitsyn played the Sixth a year ago in a Chamber Music Society recital and had to recover after a wobbly start. In Bronfman’s reading, the first two movements were the most compelling, but he had the work’s fiendish technical difficulties and abrupt mood changes well in hand. Bronfman is an artist who sits down to play at once, with no wasted motion, and he’s not easily distracted. During the Brahms, the cell phone belonging to the woman in front of me went off not once but twice in rapid succession. Bronfman simply played through the disturbance as if he didn’t hear it. At the end of the piece, though, he turned to the audience, saying puckishly, “Was that call for me?”