Early September in New York City means pianist Taka Kigawa strides onto the stage at (le) poisson rouge, sits at the Yamaha and plays some of the most demanding of modernist classical music. This year Kigawa played the complete solo piano music of Pierre Boulez on Sunday night.

This was the most impressive of Kigawa’s concerts in recent years. It is one thing to play the fascinating, evocative Etudes of Pascal Dusapin and the mysterious, thrilling work of Stockhausen—quite another to play the dense, at times clumsy, and often stone-faced Boulez.

While other composers want to express their thinking in a way that reaches the listener, Boulez’s music often sounds like it is having a secret argument with the classical tradition, and even that the composer is arguing with himself—one gets the feeling of hearing raised yet muffled voices from another room.

Playing the three Piano Sonatas and the shorter works Incises, Douze Notations, and Une page d’éphéméride, Kigawa was expressive in a way one has not heard before in this music. While Boulez’s dissonance, atonality and abstracted rhythms and structures are very different than Debussy, for example, and even from Boulez’s beloved Webern, Kigawa played everything with a searching, lyrical touch. His articulation was careful, clear, and varied, even in rapid and complex passages, and that reflected thinking that was equally considered, thorough, and certain. He didn’t just play through the notes—an accomplishment in itself in the arduous Second Sonata. Rather, it was as if he were holding a séance in which Boulez might appear and explain everything, but Kigawa had his own ideas.

While this was impressive enough in the Second Sonata, the longest piece and last on the program, it was even more so in the First Sonata. The piece has a difficult ambiguity—not just in the details of its extreme serial processes of pitch, rhythm, and more, but in the feeling that Boulez was figuring out if it was even worth writing piano music. Each gesture is etched but each feels at odds with the preceding and following ones. Underneath the atonality, there is a conflict between density and aggression and concision and lyricism.

Kigawa favored the latter idea and not only managed to channel the entire First Sonata through it, but the whole of the concert. This piece came last on the first half, following a delicate and searching performance of Incises and a surprisingly moody interpretation of the Third Sonata. The Third was never finished; Boulez used it to experiment with random order, but seems to have never concluded how best to do that. Kigawa played three of the “Formants” in the order 2-1-3, moving from what can sound like musical events in search of form to something close to a regretful ballade.

This intellectual clarity and coherence, something close to narrative, was compelling. The shape of the second half expanded and deepened it, with the aphoristic Une page sandwiched by Douze Notations and the Second Sonata. His earliest piano work, the Douze Notations, is arguably his best one—quizzical, daring, fascinated with the piano. The music explores multiple ideas about consonance, dissonance, emotions, and more; Kigawa’s consistent thinking made it sound something like Schumann, episodes in a complete life, with beautiful phrasing in the “Fantasque – Modéré” and “Doux et improvisé,” and wit in “Rythmique.”

The Second Sonata is not only technically difficult but expressively so. It’s argumentative in a way that can make it sound dated, a piece from the late 1940s that tries to follow the intellectual trend of the time to demolish the classical tradition, which led into a dead end.

This is where Kigawa was at his best, playing with a feeling of space and thus tension, keeping the music spilling forth with the logic that Boulez was not just dismantling but building something new. It felt measured, even as the overall pace was faster than most other performances. Presenting Boulez at his best, Kigawa was at his very best as an interpreter.