Yefim Bronfman may not be the gentlest virtuoso in the world. He definitely is a pianist, not a pianissimist. That hardly mattered on Sunday, when, with a lot of help from six fabulous friends, he assembled a stimulating concert that juxtaposed new storms with old stresses. Ear-candy was in short supply.

The festivities began with a tough and clangorous premiere by Marc-André Dalbavie (born 1961), followed by the rhapsodic turbulence of Shostakovich. After the interval, Bronfman introduced 11 difficult pieces by Jörg Widmann (born 1973) followed by the indulgent Weltschmerz of Tchaikovsky. A thinking person’s musician had mustered a thinking person’s agenda.

The unblushing programme annotation heralded Dalbavie’s Trio No. 1 as “dazzling and melodious”. It struck at least one listener as neither. Pitting the piano against the strings most of the time, the score emerged sparse and sombre, spicy and spiky. It dared to dabble in unfashionable dissonance, using simple textures to build complex structures. Bronfman’s intermittently percussive bravado was deftly punctuated by Lynn Harrell’s mellow cello and Gil Shaham’s suave violin (never mind the occasional pitch problem).

The ponderous convolutions of Shostakovich’s G-minor Piano Quintet (1940) provided the contrast of bleak neo-romanticism, with a bit of sweetening at the end. Bronfman and the Emerson String Quartet traced the decadent lines with restraint, elegance enhancing eloquence.

In his finger-wrenching Humoresken, Widmann created a compact set of character studies, some subtle, some raucous, some nervy, some witty. Although Schumann is cited as the central inspiration, more likely influences seem to be Widmann’s teachers, Hans Werner Henze and Wolfgang Rihm. The primary appeal in any case remains intellectual, not emotional. Bronfman surmounted every hurdle with demonic bravura.

Tchaikovsky’s A-minor Piano Trio gushed grandly as the afternoon drew to a long and leisurely close. Bronfman, Shaham and Harrell passed the expressive flourishes back and forth neatly, sustaining precarious balances as well as tension against the odds. They even managed to resist the lure of premature bombast. It was reassuring.

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