Oh Henry

Last year, the Epworth Church bought a 1910 Steinway model A grand, recently rebuilt. Pianists love it. A lot of sound comes out of that small chassis, a sound warm and remarkably even all the way up and down the keyboard. The inaugural concert featured two of Boston's favorite younger musicians, Leslie Amper and Randall Hodgkinson. Last week, 73-year-old pianist Robert Henry played a benefit recital for World Hunger Relief, one more addition to the long list of things to be grateful to Ed Mark for.

Henry's American parents were Methodist missionaries in Suzhou, China, when he was born. His greatest teacher was Eduard Erdmann, a legendary figure who rarely left Hamburg. When Erdmann died, Henry succeeded him at the Musikhochschule until he retired in 1986. He continues to live and concertize in Hamburg. Thirty years ago, the Globe's Michael Steinberg gave him a rave review for a Boston recital. He was right.

Henry is a musician they don't make 'em like anymore. He offered a difficult but noble program: masterpieces by Bach, Bartók, and Schumann that turn up all too rarely these days: ambitious yet intimate works, austere yet prismatically colorful, demanding bigtime virtuosity without show-offy display. The period-instrument movement has put a virtual moratorium on Bach on the piano. Which is too bad, because for an earlier generation the piano -- in the hands of such great musicians as Artur Schnabel, Harold Samuel, and Myra Hess -- provided opportunities not only for color and shading but for profound, unsentimental, unromanticized exploration and interiorization. Glenn Gould may have made his piano sound like a harpsichord, though even his apparent "objectification" now seems more like the extreme personal statement of a unique personality.

In Henry's Bach A-minor English Suite, the beauties of the Prelude emerged through a restraint that acknowledged something ravishing that needed to be restrained. The Sarabande, with its varied ornamentation, was not less a slow dance than a solemn hymn, the instrumental version of a chorale from some lost Bach Passion. Henry lets the melodic line take center stage, but his firm and lilting rhythm keeps self-indulgent romanticism at bay. He hears the architecture.

Bartók's colorful Out of Doors, from 1926, sounds modern not because of jagged atonalities but because he regards Hungarian folk harmonies as further out, more exotic, more adventuresome, than traditional 19th-century harmonies, older but also newer -- an intersection of the ancient/earthy with the avant-garde. Folk dancing in the woods, an ominous barcarolle (Death in Venice lurking around the next bend in the canal), a wild hunt, the "night music" of forest creatures signaling to one another, their chirping and chirruping punctuated by the distant tolling of vespers. This is program music not only for the ear but also for the intellect, not mere atmosphere, but the expression of a proto-John-Cage-like sense that you can hear music in whatever you listen to, especially if there's someone like Bartók to transcribe it. And Henry's ferocious rhythmic precision revealed -- or created -- the underlying drama.

Schumann's Davidsbündlertänze is more overtly dramatic. The composer is projecting the opposing forces of his own character as alter egos (Florestan and Eusebius -- activist and dreamer), opposites who are members of the same "League of David," the society of artists battling the cultural Philistines. Great performances of this piece (all too rare) show the common bond that unites the contrasting characters. For Henry, Davidsbündlertänze reveals not a split personality but Schumann's singular variety. These short dances -- hearty toast or nostalgic, even painful reminiscence, heroic old ballad or searching contemplation, raucous joke or tears of sorrow -- were like a story, a biography, perhaps even an autobiography.

Here, Henry felt freer to play with and alter rhythm, coming up with surprising accentuations, then with teasing wit making the passages Schumann marks "simple" sound childlike in their squareness. The penultimate of the 18 dances, "As if from far away," was especially poignant in its recollection of the second dance, and (even more moving) the last dance, "Not fast," which can sometimes seem like a tacked-on happy ending, this time seemed heartbreakingly stoic in the necessity of its return to the outside world, not merely willful but an inevitable acceptance of reality.

The piano had an occasional twang or "buzz." Several of the "Not fast" movements in the Schumann were a little too leisurely for their own good and lost momentum (or were not leisurely enough). But these are quibbles. The sole encore was the last and most piercing (that harrowing modulation!) of Schubert's six Moments Musicaux, and Henry closed the piano lid at the end of it. I hope he'll open it again soon.