The concertgoers Sunday night at the Broward Center for Hilary Hahn’s recital heard one of the finest violinists working today, but they also heard much more.

They were present for nothing less than a festival of brand-new music, all of it worthy, and some of it that could have strong claims for the repertory.

Hahn, who turns 32 at the end of this month, has had a remarkable career since the Baltimorean entered the Curtis Institute at the tender age of 10. The winner of two Grammys, she’s an indefatigable recording artist whose catalog is testimony to how discipline, hard work, and intellectual curiosity will allow a performer to enjoy the fullest flowering of her talent.

There are violinists with a more arresting tone quality and a more dramatic stage presence, but there are very few with Hahn’s particular kind of accuracy and thoroughgoing mastery of every musical detail. This is a player who has carefully thought out how she wants every phrase to go, and so much so that she then can take interpretive risks on the fly in real time.

Sunday night’s concert marked the end of Hahn’s current tour, in which she is debuting half of 26 commissioned “encores,” short works by major and emerging composers around the globe that Hahn has spent the past couple years commissioning, mostly by cold-calling writers she admires. And she’s commissioned a 27th and final encore from the global public, giving composers anywhere a chance to write one for her.

That alone is remarkable (as is her low-key way of going about it; more flamboyant musicians would have choked cyberspace with press releases and Tweets had the idea occurred to them), but on the evidence presented from the Au-Rene Theater stage, it’s been a considerable success.

The bulk of the 13 new pieces, some of them only about a month old, were reflective in character, with slowish tempi (at least at the beginning) and a tonal language of mild dissonance. All of the pieces made effective use of the piano, played here by the Ukrainian-born Valentina Lisitsa, whose work was excellent throughout, and occasionally showed off the in-your-face muscularity for which her playing is celebrated.

Hahn salted her scheduled program of music by J.S. Bach, Beethoven and Brahms with the 13 encores, playing eight in the first half and five in the second. The recital opened with seven of the pieces, followed by the Beethoven (the Sonata No. 2 in A, Op. 12, No. 2) and the eighth encore. She started the second half with Bach (the solo Sonata in G minor, BWV 1001), then played the other five encores, and ended with the Brahms (the Sonatensatz in C minor, WoO 2).

[Note: Because Hahn chose to present 13 Florida premieres at her concert, it’s only fair to give a brief assessment of each piece, though that will make this review rather long.]

The best of the lot, as far as suitability for an end-of-concert confection contrast, were Jennifer Higdon’s Echo Dash (which came fourth), a non-stop, joyous, rhythmically infectious workout for both instruments, and the first-half closer, Israeli composer Avner Dorman’s Memory Games, whose aggressive opening gambit was close to jazz-rock, with its back-and-forth modal harmonies and booty-shaking syncopations.

Two of the new pieces were striking for sheer beauty: Whispering, by the 83-year-old Finnish master Einojuhani Rautavaara (played ninth), in which a melancholy line rises above relatively simple chords in the piano that beautifully unfold into different keys, followed by a delicate wash of ascending figures in the violin that take the instrument into a high-floating realm of loveliness. The other was the British composer Max Richter’s Mercy, an almost painfully gorgeous meditation on plainsong, distinguished by an insistent, sorrowing melody in the violin that grew in anguish over a repeated series of haunting, barely moving piano chords.

Richter’s piece made a most effective closing work for the recital, no less so than how the opener, Bifu, by the Japanese composer Somei Satoh, got the concert off to an auspicious start. This, too, was sweetly sad, as a gently dropping scale made its delicate way over the first five notes of a minor-key scale, traveling up and down in the piano. Tina Davidson’s Blue Curve of the East (played 11^th) made good use of pizzicati and rhythm and opened into a wiry, tense theme that added another layer of color to a vivid, engaging piece by this expert American composer.

The German-Danish composer Søren Nils Eichberg’s Levitation preceded the Davidson, and focused on a four-note climbing scale pattern that then repeated slightly higher, driving the music forward, in a piece of power and density that culminated in a landscape marked by big trills. American composer Paul Moravec’s Blue Fiddle, which came after the Davidson, had a first section marked by two bluesy falling chromatic licks and thick, dark chords in the piano, after which came a strongly rhythmic second section full of acrobatics for both instruments, played surpassingly well by both women.

Gillian Whitehead, one of New Zealand’s most eminent composers, contributed Torua (played third), a reflection on the February earthquake in Christchurch; its tone was set early on by a tender, mournful piano progression and striving, rising themes for the violin. It closed in memorable fashion, with plucked harmonics for the violin and pressed notes in the piano creating an exceptional coda of hollow-sounding notes that evaporated quietly.

The sixth encore of the night, Solitude d’Automne, by the Macau-born Chinese composer Bun-Ching Lam (now a resident of Paris), had a similarly haunting opening of hushed single notes in the piano, setting the stage for a landscape of quiet, stark, fractured music that ended in stasis. The young American composer Nico Muhly’s Two Voices (which came second), offered a gently expanding series of melodic fragments and plain chords for the violin over a one-note piano part that eventually fell slightly, changing the shading but not the overall mood, which was contemplative and soft, expiring in a straightforward minor-key chord.

The Greek composer Christos Hatzis’s Coming To (played seventh), imaginatively presented the waking process, with half-heard passages of what sounded like distorted Big Band melodies as the volume slowly grew. Hatzis’ piece climaxed with a big, almost-schmaltzy theme that Hahn and Lisitsa played with gusto. The fifth encore, Speak, Memory, by the Russian-born pianist and composer Lera Auerbach, referenced the Nabokov memoir of that title with a somber, passionate theme for the violin singing amid a dark, severe harmonic framework.

The decent-sized audience received all these works with politeness, but with real enthusiasm for the Higdon, Dorman and Richter pieces. They were warmest, though, for the Bach, music that Hahn has held close to her heart all her musical life.

And the G minor sonata got a superb performance that showed why Hahn is in the elite of today’s violin players. She has no intonation problems, as the repeated octaves in the first movement, all beautifully in tune, demonstrated, and her command of her instrument is so thorough that she was able to present this music wholly as something of hers, and not something in which every minute of the effort to learn and interpret it was also on display.

The first movement was nobility personified, elegiac without being overwrought, elegant without being precious, and all of the elaborate filigree of the French overture-style writing pearl-like and smooth. Her second-movement Fugue was also an object lesson in the importance of control, with Hahn able to let each inner voice sing out perfectly without losing track of the tempo or everything else going on the music.

The third movement Sarabande was in one way the high point of the sonata in that she gave it a kind of wilting grace that was not only very attractive but also focused attention on the melody of the movement, giving it shape and charm. She played the closing Presto with fire and absolute accuracy, the pace never flagging and with each note sounded to its fullest even as each one flew by.

The Beethoven sonata got a good, crisp reading here, with a brisk tempo in the opening movement and careful attention paid to the humorousness of the two-note figures that make up the main theme. Hahn played the secondary theme with a different kind of accent both times, looking over at Lisitsa, but the pianist didn’t take the hint in her echo, playing it the same way both times.

The Andante second movement was lovingly and gingerly crafted, with a gentle but insistent push on the major-key secondary theme, bringing out its simple beauty and inner tension. The finale sounded a little rushed, and lost a bit of its wit and playfulness, fine as the playing from both women was.

The scherzo movement that Brahms wrote for the collaborative sonata of 1853 (with Schumann and Albert Dietrich), which ended the concert, also was somewhat overheated, though there was no denying its excitement. Lisitsa gave the big chordal outbursts a bit too much heft, giving the music a somewhat lopsided shape.

After the ovations from the crowd, Hahn, who was wearing a striking red strapless dress with an appliqué starburst design, returned for an encore with Lisitsa. The two have just released a beautiful recording of the four sonatas of Charles Ives, and so closed their concert with Ives’ Largo, written in 1901 for a violin sonata the composer later discarded.

This was a beautiful, grave and searching Ives, and another example of Hahn’s willingness to challenge her audience in the belief that they’ll come right along with her, even through a concert made almost entirely of brand-new music. Much of the audience might not have been aware of what a rare, exceptional achievement they were sitting through, but Hahn pulled it off, helped along by her modest, almost apologetic manner during her remarks, which no doubt helped win her auditors over.

This recital will stand without question as one of the major events of this concert season, no matter what comes next. Hilary Hahn has done a wonderful thing for the cause of contemporary classical music by commissioning all this fresh work, being unafraid to program every bar of it, and playing it definitively and brilliantly. It was, and is, an astonishing achievement.

She signed her first record contract with Sony at age 16, and her career has only climbed steadily into the empyrean of classical music stardom since then.

But it is a mark of the unpretentious, hardworking, homemade character of the professional life Hilary Hahn has built that while she could easily pull back and let the machinery of big fame bring gift-wrapped opportunity to her door, she’d rather pursue the things that interest her and take care of them herself.

And that’s why the Grammy-winning violinist was cold-calling Kryzsztof Penderecki a while back, asking the great Polish composer to write a short encore piece for her.

“With Penderecki, I didn’t know if he’d be interested or not. You never know, because with cold calling, you don’t know the person, so you can’t test the waters first,” said Hahn, who plays a recital this coming Sunday night in Fort Lauderdale. “Penderecki I called in German, and that was difficult because I was pitching the project, trying to explain it, in my second language, to someone in their second language.”

But Penderecki agreed, and while he hasn’t submitted the piece yet to Hahn, she’s programming it for the 2012-13 concert season. The new work will take its place among 26 others written by composers ranging from major established writers such as David Del Tredici and Einojuhani Rautavaara to up-and-comers like the young Nico Muhly, in a project called In 27 Pieces: the Hilary Hahn Encores.

Some of those encores will be heard at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts on Sunday evening, when Hahn takes the stage with Valentina Lisitsa, the fine Ukrainian-born pianist who is a familiar face in South Florida’s concert halls. Hahn will play the Sonata No. 3 in G minor (BWV 1001) of J.S. Bach, the Beethoven Sonata No. 2 (In A, Op. 12, No. 2), and the Sonatensatz of Johannes Brahms, the scherzo movement he wrote in 1853 for a collaborative sonata with Robert Schumann and Albert Dietrich.

Hahn’s recital comes two weeks after the release of her 15^th album, a disc devoted to the four violin sonatas of Charles Ives, which she plays with Lisitsa. It’s a bold choice, and well in keeping with Hahn’s remarkable discography, and her life in general.

Hahn began playing just before her fourth birthday in a Suzuki class in her hometown of Baltimore, and by 10 was a student at Philadelphia’s prestigious Curtis Institute. Her first disc was devoted to the solo music of Bach, a most unusual move for a violinist just starting a big career. Her other efforts, first on Sony and now on Deutsche Grammophon, include a thrilling account of the Schoenberg Violin Concerto, new concertos by Jennifer Higdon and Edgar Meyer, the Serenade of Leonard Bernstein, Mozart violin sonatas, and concerti by Barber, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Elgar, Sibelius, Paganini, and even the now-forgotten Ludwig Spohr.

She’s played on James Newton Howard’s soundtrack for M. Night Shyamalan’s thriller The Village, and for records by folkie Tom Brosseau and Austin rockers And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead. She’s picked up two Grammy awards and a sheaf of European recording prizes, and in 2001 was named America’s Best Classical Musician by Time magazine.

The Ives sonatas, written over a period from 1902 to 1916 by the maverick American composer, weren’t familiar to Hahn until recently.

“Those four sonatas are really unusual, and I had not heard them myself until I was looking around for music to add to recital repertoire, and I realized that I had never played anything by Ives. And he’s one of those prominent composers who is so incredibly influential, you don’t even really realize how much until you start working on their music,” she said.

It was the Third Sonata, a beautiful, reflective, deeply serious work finished in 1914, that first caught Hahn’s ear.

“I liked the Third Sonata immediately. I liked the others as well, but as far as which one I wanted to program for my next recital, I was drawn to the Third,” Hahn said. “And I really liked playing that one, so we programmed the rest of them in the next recital series.”

“Playing these pieces has been just fantastic,” she said. “When a group of people is hearing something that they’re not extremely familiar with, it doesn’t matter when it’s from; you get this really interesting feedback.”

While Ives’s aesthetic is famously one of reference to the activities and sounds of small-town New England in the period just after the Civil War, for Hahn, interpreting Ives is less about knowing what hymn tune he was referencing than it is about making the pieces work.

“There’s a lot of research you can do, but in the end, it’s about bringing the music across to the audience,” she said. “It’s fun to pick things out of the music and focus on ‘where did this come from,’ and ‘what is the history of that,’ but in the end it has to come across as integral music, and not just bits and pieces of things.

“And for me with Ives, that is a big challenge. There is so much going on at any one time. The music is complex, but it’s also meaningful, so that you can pick out different meanings each day that you play it.”

Hahn said Ives’s writing for the violin is not that difficult, but that the piano part is incredibly so, and marrying the two is what proved to be the biggest challenge.

“Putting it together is harder than the actual violin parts,” she said. “The violin parts are pretty playable. There are some tricky sections, but for the most part it’s not that impossible.

“With all of the rhythms needing to line up the way they need to in order for the music to make sense, first you have to kind of go through it and figure out what goes where, and then you can get into the music itself,” she said. “So it was figuring out that what-goes-where that was new to me.”

The idea for the encores, too, came out of a process of discovery and pursuing the idea to its logical conclusion. Hahn, who turns 32 in late November, said it began about 10 years ago, when the violinist became aware of how many collections of encores had been published and recorded, and how many of them contained the same “golden oldies.”

“I just figured ‘Well, that’s interesting, but I wonder where the new ones are?’” she said.

Thus was born the encores project, and Hahn soon realized she’d have to be the one to get it off the ground.

“It’s such a big project that it’s impossible for anyone else to take the initiative besides the person who really, really wants to see it happen,” she said, and once she figured out where to start, she engrossed herself in it. “I dove into it on my own initiative, and that made it a very personal project and a lot of fun, actually.”

And it generated a large number of responses, which Hahn cut off at 27 “because I got carried away and I had to stop somewhere,” she said, adding that she didn’t realize at first how many composers would agree to take part in the project.

One of the composers is Paul Moravec, 53, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for his Tempest Fantasy for piano, violin, cello and clarinet. He said he was at the Santa Fe Opera in 2009 for the premiere of his first opera, The Letter, when Hahn called him and asked him to participate.

“I was delighted that she thought of me,” Moravec said, who added that he and Hahn have not yet met, though he was aware of her work through her recordings, “which are fantastic.”

Moravec’s piece, Blue Fiddle, will be played Sunday night. He said it’s about 4 minutes long, and according to his program note, was designed to reflect “the wide range of Ms. Hahn's astonishing technical and artistic mastery.”

“The principal challenge is to be as comprehensive as possible in a short piece, to use that time wisely and put a lot of material into it, which is what I did in this piece,” Moravec said. “There’s a lot going on in a short duration … There’s a lyrical vibe to it, and there’s also a fast, virtuosic vibe as well.”

Moravec said he and Hahn have communicated about tempos and other details, but he’s not yet heard the piece, and Sunday night’s audience will hear it before its composer does.

“For me, the word ‘encore’ suggests a sort of lightness, an ‘l-i-t-e’ kind of thing, a bon-bon, a dessert,” Moravec said. “Personally, I’m not interested in that. What I wanted was something that entertains, but which is also substantive … That’s what I tried to do in this piece. I tried to make it musically interesting, musically substantive, and not just a showpiece.”

A total of 26 composers have written or are writing the encores, but for the 27^th, Hahn has planned something unusual. Last week, she announced that the last encore will be chosen from an online contest open to anyone in the world who wants to write it. She’s opened the contest online (at www.hilaryhahncontest.com), and will accept submissions from Nov. 15 through March 15.

She’ll play the piece she likes best of all the entries in her recital programs in 2012-13, and record it for release in 2013-14. Each submission will generate a $2 donation to Dramatic Need, a British charity that brings arts programs to poor rural communities in South Africa and Rwanda.

Hahn, who writes regular journal entries at her website, www.hilaryhahn.com, and Tweets in the persona of her violin case (@violincase), also conducts regular interviews of composers for Sequenza 21, the contemporary classical music web portal. Although she didn’t know much about computer technology when Sony first built her a website, she has taken it to heart and made it her own, and says she could not have done the encores project without it.

“I just sort of did it all online,” she said.

Technology’s ability to break down old cultural barriers also has led to a broader audience for her concerts, another development that Hahn applauds.

“I do see quite a variety of people in the hall, and every concert that I can remember there’s been someone for whom it was a new experience to go to a concert,” she said, shortly before hanging up to get to the airport for the next stop on her tour. “And there’s always some veteran concertgoers who come up and tell me stories.”

In other words, like with the encores and the sonatas of Charles Ives, plenty of different things going on.

“I like that variety,” she said.

Hilary Hahn and Valentina Lisitsa will perform at 7 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 6, in the Au-Rene Theater at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts, Fort Lauderdale. Tickets range from $15-$55. Call 954-462-0222 or visit www.browardcenter.org.

A vivid reading of a madrigal sequence by Monteverdi and a heartfelt performance of a Victoria hymn stood out Thursday night as the Seraphic Fire chamber choir opened its new series of regular performances in Palm Beach County.

In its 10^th season, Patrick Dupré Quigley’s professional chorus has arrived at an enviable place in South Florida musical life, having grown steadily in prestige and accomplishment after its founding at Miami’s Church of the Epiphany in 2002. Its most recent self-released disc, a recording of the two-piano “London” version of Brahms’ Requiem, reached the heights of the iTunes and Billboard charts, an achievement that conceivably could attract the attention of a major label.

One of the best things about the chorus besides the overall excellence of its musicianship is Quigley’s enthusiastic scholarship. He has a way of making the programming of 16^th-century Renaissance polyphony sound urgent and vital, which of course it is, but Quigley is able to make casual concertgoers and not just classical music intimates appreciate it.

The first program of Seraphic Fire’s current season, a tribute to the life of the great Spanish Renaissance composer Tomas Luis de Victoria, proves the point. Quigley is using the 400^th anniversary of Victoria’s death in August 1611 as a way to survey musical meditations on death from the period, and crucially, compositions largely by Victoria’s Spanish contemporaries, most of them unfamiliar to all but scholarly interest.

The concert Thursday evening at St. Gregory’s Episcopal in Boca Raton opened with Circumdederunt me, a short motet by the first important Spanish classical composer, Cristobal de Morales. The 13-member chorus was in good voice, singing with a pure, classic sound that suited the relative simplicity of this coolly beautiful work.

The Introit from the Requiem mass in Victoria’s Officium Defunctorum, which followed, benefited from much the same approach, though the music was a little more intensely colored, more dramatic. Some of that had to do with Quigley’s forceful tempo and dynamic level. In the next two pieces, both by Palestrina, the effect was different: Here, the Italian composer’s greater fluidity of line made a noticeable contrast with the two Spanish works.

In the Kyrie from Palestrina’s Missa pro Defunctis, and then the motet Sicut cervus, the chorus was looser and freer, an effect heightened by Quigley’s decision to program all four of the opening pieces in one unbroken set. All the entrances were not seamless, but the music still had the quality that makes it so remarkable, that sense of this intricate, lovely structure seemingly coming from nowhere, rising out of a group of people simply standing on a stage.

Works by three lesser-known Spanish masters – Alonso Lobo, Sebastian de Vivanco and Francisco Guerrero – came next, beginning with Lobo’s ravishing Ave Maria in eight parts. Vivanco’s O quam suavis added another color to the sonic mix with a cantus whose critical half-step up hinted ever so gently at Spain’s Arabic heritage, and the singers gave it a slightly keening touch that gave the piece shape. Guerrero’s Pan divino, gracioso, was sweet and simple, and the Lux aeterna from his Missa pro Defunctis grander and more somber, but for both the choir maintained a clear, precise texture that enabled the music to speak with eloquence.

If all that music ultimately is reverent and somewhat distant despite its timeless beauty, that was not the case with Monteverdi’s Lagrime d’Amante al Selpocro dell’Amata (A Lover’s Tears at His Beloved’s Tomb), from his sixth book of madrigals. This is writing of strong personality, full of immediacy and passion right at the surface, and the singers made much of it, beginning with the downward swoops on Ahi lasso! (Alas, I grieve!) in the first madrigal (Incenerite spoglie).

Quigley added an effective crescendo-diminuendo to the closing lines of the third madrigal (Dara la notte il sol), and there was a pretty sense of relaxation to the opening lines of the fourth (Ma te raccoglie, O Ninfa), with its simple major-key opening a change of tone from the fevered minor of the first three madrigals. The drama of the fifth (O chiome, d’or) was quite powerful, with its sudden silences and the sopranos driving the cry Ohime! (Ah, me!) home with insistence and high emotion.

This approach continued into the closing madrigal, Dunque, amate reliquie, with its repeated sighs over the lost Corinna and the tomb where she lies. Here, Quigley’s penchant for harder-edged textures paid off in a performance of absorbing drama, and listeners unfamiliar with this period of music should have noticed how different the music of Monteverdi is from what came before.

The concert closed with the hymn Pange lingua of Victoria, a gorgeous piece, performed with grace and elegance by this fine choir. The cantus here, so different in tone from the Gregorian chants that underlay the other sacred pieces, demonstrated how a skillful composer can shade his whole piece with the harmonic movement it implies, and the result was a hymn of happy devotion, radiantly sung by the choir. The switch toward the end to three-beat measures at the words Laus et iubilatio only added to its blissful effect.

For an encore after extended applause from the smallish house Thursday, Quigley led his crew in Jesus Christ the Apple Tree, the Christmas carol by the English composer Elizabeth Poston. After singing its first verses (which come from an 18^th-century American songbook), the singers filed out to the sides of the church to sing the last verse in multi-part canon, blurring the notes in the resonant acoustic and allowing the audience to hear the quality of the group’s individual voices.

This program might not suit purists looking for smoother lines or a more subdued emotional temperature, but as a worthy evening of fine Renaissance music, expertly performed, it was hard to beat.

Seraphic Fire has tried twice before, in Delray Beach and West Palm Beach, to establish a permanent beachhead in Palm Beach County. Here’s hoping that the third time’s the charm for this first-class ensemble, which does so much to raise listener spirits,as well as observer hopes about the health of South Florida’s classical scene.

Seraphic Fire performs this program at 8 tonight at All Saints Episcopal Church in Fort Lauderdale, and at 4 tomorrow at the Miami Beach Community Church in Miami Beach. Tickets are $35. Call 305-285-9060 or visit www.seraphicfire.org.

Playing the music of Franz Liszt, who was born in this month 200 years ago, usually gives a pianist free rein to indulge his inner keyboard wild man.

And yet Guillaume Vincent, who was born only 20 years ago Sunday, brought to his reading of Liszt’s epic B minor Sonata qualities such as introspection, deliberateness and mystery, casting this showpiece in an unfamiliar but rewarding light.

Vincent, a 2009 piano laureate of France’s prestigious Long-Thibaud Competition, appeared Sunday night at the Arts Garage in Delray Beach as part of a short United States tour backed by the Alliance Française. He and the audience were treated to birthday wine and cake after the recital, which also featured music of Beethoven and Brahms as well as the Liszt sonata.

Vincent is a pianist of exceptional control, a player whose command of the keyboard is so thorough as to be virtually spotless. Each of his musical and even his physical gestures appear to be precisely thought out; his hands were dancers in a ballet, choreographed to fall on the keys just-so, or to unfold at the head of an arm making its way in slow motion to the terminal B of the Liszt, where the note was crisply snapped off.

Sunday night’s program opened with the Sonata No. 13 (in E-flat, Op. 27, No. 1) of Beethoven, one of two fantasy-sonatas in this opus, the other one being the Moonlight. Vincent chose a somewhat down-tempo approach, a very soft dynamic, and in addition played the theme with legato stresses rather than staccato, making for a most unusual effect, and one quite unlike the cheerful walk-in-the-country feeling this music often gets.

But his point was to imprint the theme in the memory so we could hear what Beethoven does with it, and in that, it was effective. The contrast of the beginning with the C major variant that follows it was the more striking for taking place in such a hushed environment, and Vincent played it with ease. The second-movement three-beat scherzo was also rather slower than it needed to be, and while it moved along attractively, it could have used some more Beethovenian shock, a stronger sense of surprise, to make it stand out.

As it was, it fed logically into the slow movement proper, where Vincent seemed most at home, letting the Italianate melody sing, and taking a long, languid stroll through the cadenza-style figures. The finale was bubbly and charming, and the rhythm rock-steady, though again a shade too soft for much of the movement. What you had by the end was a highly original reading of this work in which a long, deliberate arc of time was responsible for its musical shape, no matter what the individual movements contributed. Things seemed to happen in friezes rather than in narrative, which was not always persuasive, but certainly very memorable, and almost faultlessly played.

That same huge line of argument was used to knit together the six pieces of the Op. 118 Klavierstücke of Johannes Brahms, late music in which the composer’s gifts of melody and quirks of rhythm are we to a slightly more adventurous harmonic palette that Vincent made certain to emphasize.

The first Intermezzo (in C) is marked molto appassionato, but Vincent’s interpretation had little of that, continuing the same kind of relaxed, untroubled motion prevalent in much of the Beethoven. The second Intermezzo (in A) benefited from that approach, coming off delicately beautiful and extraordinarily tender, with a bit more color in the minor-key contrasting section (particularly in the repeat, when the inner voice suddenly came out), and a richness to the key-shifting chords of the transition that suggested Debussy’s Cathédrale Engloutie.

The bluff opening section of the Ballade (in G minor) was tightly reined in, but its contrasting section was full of slithery wit, smartly played, and the succeeding Intermezzo (in F minor) had much of the same, with Vincent pointing up the spiky leaps in both hands. The Romanze (in F) was perhaps best of all, with a lovely tone and prominent inner voices in the main section and an marvelously otherworldly middle section, all trills and whispers, that made a striking impact.

The barely moving melody of the closing Intermezzo (in E-flat minor) gave Vincent another opportunity to demonstrate his skill at sotto voce dynamics and mood setting, and he barely disturbed the mystery in the martial motifs at the climax. Like the Beethoven, it was soft-spoken, highly etched playing that held its audience to close attention.

After the intermission, the concert closed with the Liszt sonata. There was no question about Vincent’s ability to play this piece with thorough technical polish, and not a bar seemed beyond him. But he also eschewed any chance to rattle bones and rafters in the more extravagant pages of this one-movement compendium of Liszt’s performance art. He began (and ended) the work with a glacially slow traversal of descending notes and tiny bursts of low chords, and when it came time to present the motto on which the whole work is based, he did it with an offhand sort of dryness that was antiseptically clear and also indicative of the kind of casual ad lib that might have led Liszt down this particular compositional trail.

This was a Liszt of muted grandeur, even though Vincent did unleash some considerable firepower in the bigger climaxes, of exceptionally soft playing, and of crystalline fingerwork. Because Liszt wasn’t trying to write a Haydn-style sonata with a traditional narrative format, this is music that can sound patchy and incomplete if the pianist doesn’t make sure to bring his most flamboyant interpretation to bear.

But Vincent did something different here, and made it work. This was among the most controlled, sealed-off readings of the piece I’ve heard, and while it might not have conformed to the ebullient Romanticism audiences expect from Liszt, in its reverent attitude and thorough understanding of every bar, it was most distinctive.

All of which made the encore, Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6, even more surprising. Here, Vincent entered much more into the usual Liszt spirit, with a rambunctious opening, a demonstrative lassan section, and a high-spirited friska in which Vincent’s octaves were played with tireless, exemplary precision. It was a delightful ending, and offered welcome lightness after the great seriousness of the formal program.

Guillaume Vincent is a very fine pianist with an original mind, whose tremendous technique is so ably deployed that the listener is never aware of the gigantic difficulties of the music he is playing. His interpretations Sunday night were quite out of the ordinary, and remarkably absorbing. But there is such a thing as too much control, and I don’t think Vincent’s overall conceptions would have been significantly altered had he brought some more vibrant colors to the pieces on his program. The sparkle he brought to his encore showed that he has no shortage of ability to do so, and one hopes to hear him expand his textures somewhat on the next hearing, and show just how complete a musician he can be.

Classical music continues to be a growth industry in Palm Beach County and South Florida generally, which is remarkable considering the depth of the current economic slump.

Perhaps it’s the wealth of technology that makes it easier to get the word out about this music, and inspires small bands of enthusiastic players and singers to get out there and try to get their voices heard. True, the area classical scene doesn’t have quite the breadth of the classical capitals, such as New York, Chicago or London, and most of the activity remains seasonal.

But there’s more than enough out there to keep concertgoers very busy during the winter months, and here’s a look at some of the highlights:

ORCHESTRAS: The Boca Raton Symphonia returns for a fifth season, led once more by the great French pianist Philippe Entremont. Young soloists have become something of a specialty for the group, and this year the players include the American pianist Claire Huangci, who won the national Chopin Competition in Miami last year. She’ll play the Saint-Saëns Second Concerto on April 1 on a program that also features the Czech Suite of Dvořák.

Pianist Alex Korbin, winner of the gold at the 2005 Van Cliburn Competition, plays the Beethoven Fourth on Jan. 15 with conductor Arthur Fagen, who will lead the band in a world premiere: Five Brief Essays by Marshall Turkin, the former Pittsburgh orchestra executive who founded the Symphonia after the demise of the Florida Philharmonic.

Violinist Tim Fain opens the season Dec. 4 with the Prokofiev Second Concerto , while violinist Areta Zhulla, an Itzhak Perlman protégé, plays the Barber Violin Concerto on Feb. 5 (also on the program is the Beethoven Second Symphony). Pianist Sebastian Knauer joins Entremont on March 18 for the Double Concerto of Mozart and also plays the Bach E major Concerto. (All concerts are at the Roberts Theater, St. Andrew’s School, Boca Raton.)

Spanish conductor Ramon Tebar, who will conduct Zhulla and the Boca Symphonia, has his hands full as well with his directing duties for Florida Grand Opera and the Palm Beach Symphony. The Palm Beachers will again play in different venues for each of their six concerts, opening at the Society of the Four Arts (Dec. 7) with the last symphony of Mozart (Jupiter) and the first by Beethoven (No. 1 in C, Op. 21).

Two big late Romantic symphonies are planned for Jan. 30 at the DeSantis Family Chapel on the campus of Palm Beach Atlantic University: Dvorak’s Ninth (From the New World) and Tchaikovsky’s Fourth. A Spanish-themed program is set for Bethesda-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church on Feb. 13, with music by Turina and Chavarri, Boccherini’s Night Music of the Streets of Madrid, and Rodion Shchedrin’s version of the Carmen Suite of Bizet. And the International Certificate of Piano Artists competition joins forces with the strings of the Symphony for an all-Bach program that features all the two-keyboard concerti and the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 (DeSantis Chapel, Feb. 27.

The season ends March 7 at the Flagler Museum with Haydn (Symphony No. 104) and Beethoven (Symphony No. 8). A gala benefit concert also is planned for April 10 at the Kravis Center, featuring Dvorak’s Eighth Symphony and the flamboyant Uzbek pianist Lola Astanova in the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1. The conductor will be the veteran Jahja Ling, now at the San Diego Symphony, and a longtime director of the Florida Orchestra in Tampa.

The Lynn Philharmonia, the orchestra of Lynn University’s Conservatory of Music, has roughly 75 players, which makes it a full-size rather than a chamber orchestra, and its season is ambitious and full.

One of the most challenging programs comes Jan. 28 and 29, when the orchestra takes on the Symphony No. 1 of John Corigliano, a major contemporary landmark (the program also includes John Adams’ Short Ride in a Fast Machine and the Weber Clarinet Concerto, with soloist Jon Manasse). Conductor Albert-George Schram has scheduled another popular American piece, Jennifer Higdon’s Blue Cathedral, for March 24 and 25; the late Divertimento of Leonard Bernstein, Respighi’s Pines of Rome, and the Horn Concerto No. 1 of Richard Strauss, with soloist Gregory Miller, fill out the rest of the program.

The Philharmonia’s annual concerto competition concerts are set for Dec. 3 and 4, and two symphonies by Beethoven – Nos. 5 and 6 – are scheduled for Nov. 5 and 6. Lynn Conservatory chief Jon Robertson, a fine pianist, is joined by David and Carol Cole (cello and violin) for the Beethoven Triple Concerto on Feb. 18 and 19 (the Dvorak Seventh Symphony also is scheduled), and on March 17 and 18, the orchestra is joined by young artists from the Florida Grand Opera for concerts of popular opera arias.

Also on the horizon is the South Florida Symphony, based in Fort Lauderdale and the reincarnation of the Key West Symphony Orchestra. The group has been plagued with money problems, in particular a litany of complaints about its failure to pay its players. But orchestra officials insist that’s in the past, and they’re moving ahead with a three-program season – each played at four different venues -- and an affiliated chamber music series at the Arts Garage in Delray Beach.

Cellist Zuill Bailey joins the orchestra (Dec. 1-6; Dec. 4 at the Crest Theatre, Delray Beach) for the Haydn Cello Concerto in the first program, followed by the excellent violinist Chee-Yun (Jan. 25-30; Jan. 28 at the Crest) in two works by Saint-Saens: Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso and Havanaise. The series ends March 8-12 (March 11 at the Crest) with pianist Jeffrey Chappell in the Brahms Second Concerto on a program with the Fifth Symphony of Miami’s own Ellen Taaffe Zwilich.

Another local orchestra worth investigating is the Symphony of the Americas under James Brooks-Bruzzese, which premieres a new piece by Eduardo Magallenes on Oct. 18 at the Broward Center, and on Jan. 24 offers two expert teenage soloists: pianist Conrad Tao in the Rachmaninov Second Concerto, and cellist Anna Litvinenko in the Saint-Saens First Concerto. And on Feb. 28, the 9-year-old Austrian violin prodigy Elisso Gogibedaschwilli performs the Bruch First Concerto.

Further south, the Miami Symphony Orchestra under Eduardo Marturet plans 10 concerts, including world premieres of music by Sam Hyken (Oct. 23) and a guitar concerto by Alexander Berti (March 10-11). Marturet leads the orchestra in the Mahler First Symphony and Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht on March 31 and April 1, and welcomes Brazilian pianist Simone Leitao for the Prokofiev First Concerto on Dec. 10 and 11.

Most ambitious of all is the New World Symphony on Miami Beach, with its beautiful New World Center, designed by Frank Gehry, on 17^th Street. Director Michael Tilson Thomas closes the season with the Mahler Ninth Symphony (May 5-6) as part of his continuing examination of the composer’s works, and the season formally opens (it started informally Sept. 16) with a world premiere of James Lee III’s Sukkot Through Orion’s Nebula. A remarkable variety of first-class soloists and conductors is planned, including violinists James Ehnes in the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto (Jan. 7-8) and Gil Shaham in the Prokofiev Second Concerto (Feb. 17-18); cellist Johannes Moser in the Dvorak Concerto on Dec. 10-11; and French pianist Helene Grimaud and conductor Leonard Slatkin in the Beethoven Fourth (April 13-14). Soprano Christine Brewer sings Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder on Oct. 29, and mezzo Amanda Crider essays Ravel’s difficult Songs of Madagascar on Dec. 18.

The marvelous Dutch contemporary music specialist Reinbert de Leeuw conducts Messaien’s massive Turangalila on March 17, and there’s an all-John Cage concert scheduled Dec. 1, to coincide with Art Basel. Also look for Esa-Pekka Salonen, pursuing his compositional career April 7 when he leads a performance of his own Nyx on a program with the Firebird Suite of Igor Stravinsky.

Up north, the Atlantic Classical Orchestra under Stewart Robertson brings pianist Lindsay Garritson to the stage for the Saint-Saens Second Concerto (Jan. 5-6) in Vero Beach and Stuart. Schumann’s almost-symphony, the Overture, Scherzo and Finale is heard Feb. 2 and 3; violinist Elmar Oliveira plays another Schumann rarity, his Violin Concerto, on Feb. 29 and March 2, and the season closes March 29 and 30 with bassist Luis Gomez in the Koussevitzky Double Bass Concerto.

The season wouldn’t be complete without visits from touring orchestras, and this year, the Cleveland Orchestra comes north from its Miami residency at the Arsht Center with pianist Yefim Bronfman in the Brahms Second Concerto; director Franz Welser-Möst also leads the band in Sean Shepherd’s Wanderlust and the Shostakovich Sixth Symphony (Jan. 25, and Jan. 27-28 in Miami). In Miami, the orchestra is joined by soprano Dawn Upshaw in the Three Songs by Osvaldo Golijov (March 2-3), and on March 23 and 24, Argentine pianist Gabriela Montero plays the Grieg Concerto with the orchestra under Giancarlo Guerrero.

Osmo Vanska brings the Minnesota Orchestra to town March 11 with violinist Midori, who will play the Sibelius Violin Concerto (March 10 in Miami). Philippe Entremont leads the Munich Symphony and the Gloriae Dei Cantores choir in the Mozart Requiem (Nov. 15), Britain’s Royal Philharmonic and Pinchas Zukerman arrive Jan. 4 and 5 (Jan. 3 at the Broward Center), and the Tchaikovsky St. Petersburg Orchestra, with pianist Alexander Pirozhenko, appears Jan. 24 (Jan. 31 in Broward).

SOLOISTS: One of the opera world’s greatest elder statesmen, Jose Carreras, returns to South Florida for the first time since an allergic reaction shut down his recital in March 2009 at the Kravis Center after he’d sung only a few numbers. He’ll appear March 7 to start off the Festival of the Arts Boca, accompanied by a full orchestra, officials said.

The Regional Arts series at the Kravis Center offers violinistic firepower: Joshua Bell (Jan. 31) and Itzhak Perlman (March 8); pianists, too: Garrick Ohlsson appears Feb. 8 and 9 with Poland’s Wroclaw Symphony, and Menahem Pressler joins the New York Chamber Soloists on March 28. Clarinetist Richard Stoltzman appears with the New Yorkers the day before, on March 27.

At the Broward Center, the great American violinist Hilary Hahn comes to town with pianist Valentina Lisitsa on Nov. 6, and soprano Denyce Graves appears March 18. And Judy Drucker, the longtime South Florida impresaria whose Concert Association of Florida went under in 2007, returns to the stage this year with a four-concert program called the Great Artists Series. Baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky (Jan. 3) appears at the Knight Concert Hall, while pianist Vladimir Feltsman (Feb. 19), Zukerman and his wife, cellist Amanda Forsyth (March 27) and pianist Evgeny Kissin (April 15) play the New World Center.

Pianist Orion Weiss plays the Duncan Theatre’s Classical Café series Jan. 4, and pianist Arnaldo Cohen offers a recital at the Society of the Four Arts on Feb. 1. The Kravis, meanwhile, celebrates young stars with guitarist Robert Belinic (Nov. 21), violinist Hye-Jin Kim (Jan. 9), pianist Haochen Zhang (Feb. 23) and Phoebus Three, a clarinet, bassoon and piano trio (March 12). And Valentina Lisitsa takes a solo bow March 14 with Jon Robertson and the Lynn Philharmonia at the Festival of the Arts Boca. Pianist Xiayin Wang returns to the Lyric Theatre in Stuart on Jan. 21, Pinchas Zukerman is there Feb. 11, and pianist Navah Perlman (daughter of Itzhak) appears March 22.

CHAMBER MUSIC: The Delray String Quartet returns to the commissioning table again this year, this time for the new String Quartet No. 5 of Kenneth Fuchs, a Fort Lauderdale native. The quartet played Fuchs’ lighthearted Fourth Quartet last season, and this season presents the new work for the first time on Jan. 15 at the Colony Hotel in downtown Delray Beach. It also will play the work at All Saints Episcopal in Fort Lauderdale (Jan. 20) and St. Stephen’s Episcopal in Coconut Grove (Jan. 22).

The quartet will continue its three-venue, three-county regimen, welcoming clarinetist Paul Green for the Weber Clarinet Quintet (Dec. 2, 4, and 11, and an additional performance Nov. 27 for Art at St. John’s in Miami Beach), violist Chauncey Patterson for quintets by Brahms and Dvorak (Feb. 12, 17 and 19), and pianist Tao Lin for the Schubert Trout Quintet and the Schumann Piano Quartet (April 22, 24 and 29).

The Society of the Four Arts and the Flagler Museum offer some of the best chamber music performances each season, often highlighting groups still building their reputations. The Four Arts has the Brentano (Jan. 8), Faure (Feb. 19), Jerusalem (March 11) and Modigliani quartets (March 18), as well as Trio Solisti (Jan. 29), Miles Hoffman’s American Chamber Players (Jan. 15), and a return appearance by cellist David Finckel, pianist Wu Han and violinist Philip Setzer (Feb. 26), in works by Mendelssohn.

The Flagler series offers the Euclid (Jan. 24), Stradivari (Feb. 7) and Moscow (Feb. 21) string quartets, the Adaskin String Trio (Jan. 10), and violinist Johanna Marie Frankel (March 6), with pianist Gregory DeTurck. Over at the Duncan Theatre, Miami’s own Amernet String Quartet (Jan. 18) and the Afiara String Quartet (March 14) enliven the classical series, and at the Kravis, the stellar Emerson String Quartet arrives Dec. 6 (they also play Stuart’s Lyric Theatre on April 5), and the eminent Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio performs Feb. 28.

Iris van Eck’s Chameleon Musicians return for a 10th season to Fort Lauderdale’s Leiser Opera Center, with music for string trio by Bach and Reger (Oct. 9) and van Eck herself in the cello spotlight on Dec. 4. Clarinetist Michael Norsworthy joins van Eck and pianist Misha Dacic on Jan. 29 for a program that includes music by the Croatian composer Marko Tajcevic. The Amernet Quartet appears March 11, and the series ends May 6 with Schubert’s Trout Quintet.

A newcomer, the South Florida Chamber Players, debuts this season with a 10-concert series that includes regular outings at the Unitarian Church of Boca Raton. The group plays there Oct. 1, at Fort Lauderdale’s Sunshine Cathedral on Oct. 3, and the Miami Beach Community Church on Oct. 6, offering the Beethoven A minor Quartet (Op. 132), Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 13, and the Wolf Italian Serenade.

The Barber String Quartet is on tap for the third concert (Nov. 13-15), the rarely heard Fourth Quartet of Paul Hindemith on the fifth program (Jan. 21, 25 and Feb. 4), Prokofiev’s Second Quartet on the seventh program (March 19, 20 and 22), and the Second Quartet of Ralph Vaughan Williams on the ninth program (May 14, 15 and 17).

And chamber musicians from the South Florida Symphony play music by Schubert and Boccherini (Oct. 2), Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with Jeffrey Chappell (Nov. 11), Dvorak (Dec. 15), and Schumann (Jan. 15), all at the Arts Garage.

Keith Paulson-Thorp’s Music at St. Paul’s series includes two performances by the Delray Beach church’s Baroque ensemble Camerata del Re, in music from Italy (Nov. 20), the Czech lands (Aug. 19), and an afternoon of music by Georg Philipp Telemann (May 20). Also, the medieval-music ensemble Trefoil appears Jan. 8 in a concert devoted to Christmas music from medieval Italy.

CHORAL ENSEMBLES: The biggest news here is the return to Palm Beach County of Miami’s Seraphic Fire concert choir, which this season has scheduled a series of concerts at St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in Boca Raton, and one concert at the Royal Poinciana Chapel on Palm Beach.

Now in its 10^th season, Seraphic Fire is riding high on the success of its last two discs, the Brahms Requiem in its London chamber version, and Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610, both of which rode to the top of the iTunes classical charts. This year, Patrick Dupre Quigley’s chorus tackles the B minor Mass of J.S. Bach (Feb. 10-12), Renaissance requiem music to mark the 400^th anniversary of the death of Tomas Luis de Victoria (Oct. 19-23), music from the Latin American Baroque (May 9-13), and music from Tudor England (March 14-18). Also scheduled is a new version of its annual Christmas concert (Dec. 7-11), and a 10^th anniversary celebration of the group (Jan. 11-15).

Karen Kennedy, newly in charge of the Master Chorale of South Florida, teams with the Miami Symphony Nov. 18-20 for a holiday concert that includes the Bach Magnificat, and with the Boca Raton Symphonia April 20-22 for music written for or by royals, including a song by King Henry VIII as well as John Rutter’s This Is the Day, composed for the wedding this past April of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.

The exceptional 12-voice all-male choir Chanticleer returns to South Florida after an absence of some years for two appearances, one at the Vero Beach Community Church (April 17), and a second at the Parker Playhouse in Fort Lauderdale (April 18).

The Masterworks Chorus of the Palm Beaches plans John Rutter’s Mass of the Children (Nov. 20), its annual singalong concert of Handel’s Messiah (Dec. 18), and a program of choral music from television and film (April 15).