A performing life without borders

True, his technique is unimpeachable, and he certainly plays his share of Russian music. But his interests cut across solo, chamber, and concerto works, and he’s recently begun immersing himself in new music. He’s also taken insights from the period-instrument movement for his recording of the Beethoven piano concertos.

And it was only five years ago that Bronfman learned Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, a piece that seems to be coded into the DNA of Russian pianists. “I did everything the other way around,’’ he jokes by phone from his home in New York. “If I lived in Russia I probably would have learned it when I was 16.’’

Having only played the Tchaikovsky about 20 times, he is likely one of the few established pianists for whom it is still fresh and full of new insights. He performs it with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and James Levine in tonight’s season-opening concert at Tanglewood.

Bronfman has been a frequent guest at the BSO’s summer home over the years. His first trip came during the mid-1970s, when he was a student at the Marlboro Music Festival. He can still remember hearing violinist Miriam Fried and conductor Colin Davis collaborate in the Sibelius Violin Concerto. “One of the great events of my life,’’ he says.

At 15, Bronfman moved to Israel with his family. He has lived in New York since the late 1970s. His teachers include Rudolf Serkin, Rudolf Firkusny, and Leon Fleisher. Unsurprisingly, labeling performers by nationality or pedigree interests him little.

“Music has no boundaries,’’ he says. “What I like about musicians is that they don’t all fit the profile of the country they come from or the schooling they get. I want to know what they think about the music they play, their reaction to it.’’

Much of Bronfman’s activity over the last few years has been devoted to the piano concerto written for him by Esa-Pekka Salonen, a Finnish composer best known for his recently ended stint as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The piece had its debut in 2007; unlike many high-profile premieres, though, the concerto didn’t drift into oblivion. Bronfman is still playing it - including three performances this summer - and Deutsche Grammophon released a recording earlier this year.

Much like its composer and dedicatee, the concerto is hard to pigeonhole. Like much of Salonen’s music, it’s written with acerbic harmonies and dense textures. But the language seems less astringent, more Romantic than in earlier works. Bronfman points to the second movement, which balances what he calls “the new language and the language of nostalgia - two opposite forces that seem to have constant friction.

“It gives me a very positive feeling to play this piece - I feel a great sense of satisfaction,’’ the pianist says. If that sounds like tepid praise, it bears remembering that Bronfman initially groused about the difficulty of the solo part, as well as the short time he’d had to learn it.

“Every time I play it I learn something new,’’ he goes on, “about the sound, about the new, innovative spirit. The fact that [Salonen] was born in Finland doesn’t make him a Finnish musician. He basically grew up in Los Angeles. And I can hear a lot of influence of American music in his piece - there’s a certain beat to it that he has acquired living in California.’’

The Salonen concerto is not the only new music Bronfman has on his mind. He’s also playing a set of 11 “Humoresques’’ written for him by German composer Jörg Widmann, “a composer I really believe in.’’ He will also fulfill a long-held wish to perform Berg’s thorny Chamber Concerto with Pierre Boulez at this summer’s Lucerne Festival. “It’s one of the most modern pieces ever written,’’ he says of the Berg. “At the beginning you just don’t know what to make of it. [But] once you familiarize yourself with the language of the piece it becomes like a second nature.’’

In addition to tonight’s Tchaikovsky performance, Bronfman will return to Tanglewood later this summer to play the Rachmaninoff Third Concerto with Michael Tilson Thomas. During our conversation he mentions that he recently decided to take the composer’s more popular Second Concerto out of his repertoire. “I’ve played it so many times that I don’t want to play it any more,’’ he says. “I exhausted at last my emotional reserve; there’s nothing I can say about it at the moment.’’

Asked whether he might return to the piece in the future and reclaim a sense of discovery, the pianist says simply, “I hope I will grow.’’

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