Pianist Bronfman displays his dazzling technique

Pianist Yefim Bronfman is a poet of virtuosity and urbane, even unctuous, surface. To his fans at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Tuesday, that was enough. He could do no wrong in the finger-twisting challenges of a four-part Celebrity Recital program. For others, there was something missing. Call it depth.

Certainly, Esa-Pekka Salonen’s witty “Dichotomie” and Prokofiev’s thorny Sonata No. 7 revealed Bronfman’s powerhouse technique at its peak. Both have passages of relentless rhythmic drive, executed with fearsome speed and security.

Salonen’s work, according to notes by the composer, depicts a machine that acquires human feeling, then, in its second movement, shifts to describe metaphorically the behavior of a natural organism. Without losing any of its momentum, Bronfman made its woozy, inebriated stirrings of life into graceful Chaplin-esque balletic jokes.

In Prokofiev’s first of three wartime sonatas -- No. 7 was composed in 1943 -- Bronfman was strong in its aggressive passages and rather cool in its lyrical reflections, although this could be a matter of taste.

Similarly, he seemed most engaged in the exploratory second movement of Beethoven’s Sonata No. 7, with its abrupt contrasts in dynamic and impromptu feel, than in its more traditional and here rather perfunctory outer movements.

The most satisfying conjunction of Bronfman’s technique and poetry was in the series of the first seven of 10 preludes that constitute Rachmaninoff’s Opus 23. There was nothing overwrought or lacking in the velvety evenness of touch throughout the keyboard’s dynamic range. Even the “Military” prelude sounded fresh.