bagatelle

Nine grand is a mere bagatelle compared to the $175-million bond he had to pay in his New York fraud case, or the $88.3 million in all that he has been ordered to pay E. Jean Carroll in two separate cases related to Carroll’s claim that Trump sexually assaulted her at a New York department store in 1996, then defamed her by saying she lied about it.

If anything, the slowly accumulating final chord of the bagatelle could have set up the softly arpeggiated one at the start of “Twilight Way,” the first of the “Poetic Tone Pictures.”

Janacek destroyed the sonata’s third movement, tearing it out of the score and throwing it into a stove the day it premiered in 1906, but Andsnes programmed a fitting coda in a 2005 bagatelle by Valentin Silvestrov, Ukraine’s pre-eminent composer.

If there was a misstep on Tuesday, it was in following the bagatelle with Beethoven’s “Pathétique” Sonata, which might have provided an impassioned climax had it not been performed with such a level head.

That work’s relevance to demonstrations today, particularly over the Russian invasion of Ukraine, prompted Andsnes to surround it with a “Lamento” by Alexander Vustin, a Russian who was little known outside his country and died early in the pandemic, and a bagatelle by Valentin Silvestrov, whose music has come to represent Ukrainian resistance.