Pianist Meng-Chieh Liu’s magnificent clangor may have escaped the confines of Jordan Hall last night;  it did for sure in my grateful memory. His intelligent, brilliant, always-welcoming, and often high-priestly playing equaled the ingenuity and originality of his programming of three demanding sonatas written between  1926 and 1949: a piece that everyone used to play, one  that, while not beloved, has always been part of the standard repertory; and one that deserves to be heard more. We might also say that his concert comprised three of the greatest piano sonatas of the first half of the 20^th century that were not written by Prokofiev.

The last of these, Henri Dutilleux’s Sonata (1947-48), occupied the entire first half of the recital. Dutilleux, probably the most important French composer between Messiaen and Boulez, can be said to display more of Bartok’s leanness and biting sonorities and Beethoven-era structure. Perhaps we hear so little of his music because his obsession with perfection permitted him to write so little. It is also very difficult to play.

In playing it Liu demonstrated an unfailing command of its lyrical tension, its contrapuntal ingenuity, its subtle differentiation of timbres, and its wide-ranging sonorites. In all three of its lucid movements, it asks for some huge climaxes and Liu exploded with them. One of Liu’s teachers at the Curtis Institute was Jorge Bolet. And while Liu does not display the neo-romantic style favored by his teacher, one the things he may have learned from Bolet is how to exploit the piano’s abundant sonorities. Like Bolet, Liu can play powerfully, and just when the listener thought that the pianist could not play any louder, he did. In all three of the Dutilleux’s movements, particularly the third and final one, Liu reached ear-filling climaxes that never banged.

Liu brought Bartok’s 14-minute Piano Sonata (1926) to the stage after intermission with ample colorations, character, and rhythmic eclat – even in the most thickly textured chord clusters. He easily tossed off the final movement’s taxing crescendos and striking impulses.

Although the last to be completed of his three sonatas, Samuel Barber’s Piano Sonata (1949) is the least “modern” sounding. It looks back at the Romanticism of Rachmaninoff rather than to the harmonic adventurousness of Bartok and Dutilleux. And while it appears much less frequently on recital programs, it was once almost omnipresent. Flashy and accessible, it was the first large American work earn the dedicatee Vladimir Horowitz’s advocacy; he kept it in his repertory for a few years after premiering it in Carnegie Hall in 1950.

To give an idea of the sonata’s popularity with young pianists in the 1950s, one has to realize how, at that time, Van Cliburn, John Browning, and Daniel Pollack were simultaneously studying it with Rosina Lhevinne at Juilliard and thereafter performing it.

Liu’s interpretation matched the agility of the music’s earlier interpreters: ferociously dramatic in the first movement; delightfully light-fingered in the scherzo; judiciously and poetically voiced in the slow movement; and thrilling in the final fugue.

Even on an evening when the weather was awful, the paucity of the attendance was disturbing. Fit though few in number, we generously signaled our appreciation. After many curtain, calls the artist, weighted with bouquets, walked off stage, every bit the wreath-bearing laureate.

Stephen Wigler has a peculiarly geekish interest in the piano and in pianists. He has served over the years as a staff music critic in Orlando and Baltimore.