The work, a seven-movement suite in a mildly dissonant, angular style, captures some of that duality: in the early movements playful sections collapse into anxious, dark writing, and in the later movements the music's tensions gradually clear, though the innocence of the opening Prologue is not quite mirrored in the Bartokian passagework of the Epilogue.
The organist Avi Stein opened the program with a stirring rendition of the three-movement Suite in the Second Tone by Jean Adam Guilain, a German organist and harpsichordist who worked in Paris during the first half of the 18th century.
The exception is Szymanowski's "Masques," a three-movement suite, completed in 1916 when this Polish composer was living in Paris.
With its echoes of various folk musics and long-lost dance forms, Ligeti's Viola Sonata seems more a six-movement suite than a sonata and, in its way, is just as searching an examination of technique as Bartók's sonata.
Mr. Andsnes, now in a black sweater, introduced the first work, "In the Mists," a four-movement suite by Janacek.
Gustav Holst completed his seven-movement Planets suite in 1917, 13 years before Pluto was discovered.
And in George Crumb's "Eine Kleine Mitternachtmusick," a nine-movement suite for amplified piano, Monk's theme is examined through many prisms.
The earliest compositions in his official list of works are a four-movement Suite for piano and a Toccata for piano, which both date from 1875.
The piece was originally published in 1892 as the opening section ("Preludio") to a three-movement suite called Chants d'Espagne, which was expanded and republished in five movements in 1897.
Einojuhani Rautavaara's Cantus Arcticus featured the composer's own recordings of Finnish marsh and sea birds that become the concertante element in his three-movement suite.
Janacek's six-movement suite, one of his earliest surviving instrumental works, represents "Janacek before he was Janacek," as the musicologist Michael Beckerman said in preliminary remarks.
