“Ah, bitter chill it was” (Keats) Friday evening but how revelatory as well was pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, whom Vivo Performing Arts (formerly The Celebrity Series Boston) brought to Friday’s well-attended Jordan Hall with an unusual program of Schumann, Kurtág, and Janáček. Andsnes surprises and thrills, but not cheaply. He revitalizes works that we know well (or think that we know well), giving them new power and beauty through distinctive pianistic approaches. He treats legato passages as near-non-legato, giving a clear transparency to the sound. Secondly, he uses the damper pedal fearlessly to create abrupt, affirmative stops shorn of bounce or echo, and also to give the non-legato passages a depth of tone. Thirdly, and most importantly, he gives equal clarity to the left hand, bringing out interplay between the two hands that we don’t often hear. The result is spell-binding.

He opened the evening with Schumann’s Four Piano Pieces, Op. 32, composed in Vienna in 1838-9 and designed to reach Clara Wiek across the distance separating them. Andsnes gave the Scherzo a forceful, driven determination, but also a marvelously lucid quality, emphasizing the contrast between the fierce forward thrust of the turbulent leading theme and the shimmering beauty of the contrapuntal trio section, which he interpreted as a rêverie. Correctly seizing on Schumann’s uninhibited manliness, he continued the driven, unflinching display of resolve in the Gigue, nuancing the momentum with a searching quality. The Romanze, a love letter to Clara, burst into tenderness. Andnes projected the sound outward with passionate expressiveness while also keeping it intimate, close to the heart. Through subtle dynamics, he conveyed a rapturous intermingling of masculine resolve and feminine sensibility, proclaiming an indivisible union of souls that would prevail over all obstacles. (As Aaron Grad pointed out in the program notes, “during Clara’s long and successful career as a concert pianist, the Romanze was one of her go-to encores.”) The power of Andsnes’s pianism triumphed most surprisingly in the final Fughette. He imbued it with suspense and meaning by insisting on a staccato tenacity which allowed the contrasting beauty of the contrapuntal development to soar, dance-like, to a noble end. Old and grey and full of years as I am, I had never heard this “little fugue” performed with such impact.

Andsnes plunged into György Kurtág’s Játékok (“Games”) with barely a pause, inviting us to think “soundscape” rather than “composers.” The effect was immediate in unlocking Kurtág’s fascination with the aesthetics of randomness. Andsnes chose to open his selections from Játékok with Doina (Book IV, no. 10). He gave it a haunting mysteriousness through painfully clear tremolos serving as a background for incomprehensible sonic ciphers ringing out into a vast and indifferent immensity. Kurtág’s brief, concise experiments, inspired by Webern and presented by Andsnes in a marvelously random yet persuasive order, sprung into life relentlessly, combining deep throbbing in the low register with mesmerizing jiggling in the high notes, and everywhere pierced throughout with hushed estrangement, as the labels of each gem-like sonic moment provided no semantic key but instead brought us face to face with deafening discomfort. Wow. (Kurtág is about to turn 100 years old and is still adding to his open-ended “Games.”)

Again after a mere pause, Andsnes launched into Book I of Leoš Janáček’s poignant On An Overgrown Path, composed between 1900 and 1911 in memory of his daughter Olga’s death by typhoid fever. Much like Kurtág’s Games, the work is made up of a series of brief “spots” of time, construed convincingly as reminiscences – but not devoid of a secret inner disorder disturbing memory and scattering its power of retrieval. Andsnes chose to focus on the experimental vivacity of Janáček’s score rather than its surface labelling. He brought out shifts in temperature, from warm combustive sounds to cool, swift, non-legato chords. Section 2, A Blown Away Leaf, was a case in point: rather than imbue it with a lyrical, Romantic, “referential” character, Andsnes  created a surprisingly stressful, acrobatic messaging, building to an emotional climax that resolved into uncanny quietude, final but restive. He gave his full pianistic range of power to the final section, The Barn Owl Has Not Flown Away. Accentuating contrasts and exploiting rapid shifts in mood and texture, Andsnes harnessed the technical challenges into a fantastically rich aesthetic experience through glittering transparency. Beauty, he proclaimed, is all we have to throw at fate — but if we throw it with a bold new clarity in the left hand and subtle pedalwork, we throw it very effectively indeed.

Andsnes brought new life to Carnaval, Schumann’s youthful, covert experiment under the Lord of Misrule. Eschewing rubato in the Preamble, and using strong dynamics and sweeping runs, he turned it into a defiant and grand Manifesto of uncharted discovery bursting out of the piano’s latent energy with controlled purpose. Far from “imaging/imagining” the sad clown Pierrot, he turned the section into an exploration of how dynamics get ahold of a four-note anchoring theme to shape a three-dimensional space, creating a foreground and background that move and merge and diverge. In Arlequin, he showed how the austere four-note theme calls irresistibly for ornamental whimsy, before wrapping both into a Valse Noble that hides its building blocks through obfuscating dynamics that force us to respond emotionally.

Andsnes focused on both the immediate intricacies of each experiment and on the solid coherence of the whole, replacing classical forms with a new format aimed at revealing masks and illusions to purge us and liberate us, rather than deliver a comforting theme-and-development synthesis. Disrupting our expectations at every turn, he played the Sphinxes with soft chords abruptly cut off — then turned Papillons into a massive invasion of swarming victors before rendering Lettres dansantes as a thumping Ländler, sardonically earth-bound. Interrupting the pairwise pattern, he treated Chiarina-Chopin-Estrella as a triptych, interrupting the pairing pattern to give Chopin’s sound the liminal status of anabasis, looking at past and future from a high peak. A soft and sweet Aveu, filled with longing and trepidation, led to a purposeful Promenade, its chords striding forward with vigorous uplift.

In treating Pause as a brief separation rite designed to scramble the certainties of the past into a primordial plasma, he allowed the Marche des “Davidsbündler” contre les Philistins to emerge as heroic but full of dark innuendos and a deep resolve never to turn back despite its tongue-in-cheek surface. With beautifully grave dark chords in the deep register and his distinctive mastery of clarity, Andnes turned the final movement into a forceful plea for the visionary power of music.

Responding to thunderous applause and ovations, Andsnes treated us to two encores that served as the perfect end to this mind-expanding program. Chopin’s Tarantelle in A-flat Major, Op. 43, was described by Schumann as a “wild fantasy”, revealing “the dark side of his soul.” Andnes gave us a fast and furious rendition, almost satanic. Then, to lighten the mood and send us home with lighter hearts, he ended the evening with Mozart’s delightful Rondo in D Major, K. 485.

Leon Golub is an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge and has been a lover of classical music for over 50 years.