Grammy Award-winning pianist and 2019 Musical America Artist of the Year, Russian-born Daniil Trifonov brings his vibrant musical talent to bear on a pair of colorful masterpieces. First up is Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 18, known as “The Hunt,” thanks to a buoyant horn-call motif in the finale. In it, you’ll notice playful high spirits are to the fore, yet there’s room for tenderness, too. Then, nothing conjures images quite like Pictures at an Exhibition. A gallery guide in musical form, the half-hour work—originally written for and played tonight by solo piano—paints a series of vivid musical canvases connected by Mussorgsky’s famous “Promenade” theme.

A musical smorgasbord opens with harpist Julia Coronelli playing Debussy’s shimmering “Arabesque No. 1” (you’ll recognize it) followed by Schumann’s dreamy “Romance” for Oboe and Piano played by Erik Behr and guest artist Orion Weiss. Clarinetist Jason Shafer finesses Gershwin’s jazz-inflected Three Preludes before Polina Sedukh performs a 21st-century masterwork: Missy Mazzoli’s evocative Vespers for amplified violin and electronic soundtrack. Concluding the concert in martial style, Music Director Alasdair Neale conducts the orchestra in the colorful third movement from Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, the “Pathétique.”

Claude Debussy’s experiments in harmony and form changed the course of music history in a creative career stretching from 1890 to 1917. Principal Flute Linda Lukas plays Syrinx, a sinuous solo, which was originally intended as offstage music during a play but would come to redefine the capabilities of the modern instrument. The Edgar M. Bronfman String Quartet will then play the composer’s String Quartet, a tonally shifty and equally groundbreaking work whose sensual impressionism, in the words of Pierre Boulez, freed chamber music from its “frozen rhetoric and rigid aesthetics.”

Often considered Brahms’ greatest chamber work, the Piano Quintet in F Minor had a complex compositional history. Completed in 1864, it began life two years earlier as a string quintet, which was then transcribed for two pianos. In its final form, it is notable for its musical cohesiveness and a brooding quality that ranges from the tragic to the practically possessed. It is played here by a string quartet from the Festival Orchestra—Erin Schreiber, Shawn Weil, Shannon Farrell Williams, and Bjorn Ranheim—with Peter Henderson on piano.