One of the greatest pleasures of Chicago's concert life in recent years has been virtually annual visits from Mitsuko Uchida.

An important figure on the international classical music scene since the early 1980s, the Japan-born pianist visited Chicago only sporadically in the 1990s, mainly, she said, because of scheduling difficulties. Since 2001, however, Chicago has become a regular stop for Uchida, either for solo piano recitals or appearances with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. On Sunday afternoon a large crowd crawled out from under the snow and made its way to Symphony Center to hear Uchida's solo recital of music by Pierre Boulez, Schubert and Beethoven.

They were rewarded with a blend of unfamiliar and familiar works, an ideal combination of stimulation and comfort for a winter afternoon.

Uchida opened with Boulez's Notations, 12 tiny, astringent morsels for solo piano composed in 1945. Next came an unfinished Schubert sonata, the C Major Sonata D840 (Reliquie), a work unfamiliar even to some of the many professional pianists and teachers in the audience. She closed with a Beethoven Hammerklavier Sonata that all but set the stage on fire.

Now in her mid-50s, Uchida combines incandescent clarity and endless reserves of power and speed with a searching intelligence. Juxtaposing Boulez's highly disciplined Notations - a set of a dozen pieces, each only 12 bars long, each exploring a different musical issue - with the fragment of a piano sonata that Schubert simply set aside for unknown reasons, was inspired. Fragments, we realized, come in all forms. Twelve bars of Boulez knitted into a polished, gleaming whole can express a complete universe of ideas and emotion in a minute or two. Two long movements of an unfinished Schubert sonata can leave us wondering where he was headed.
Notations, which Boulez has been orchestrating for the past decade for the CSO, was a stunning showcase for Uchida's meticulous but profoundly expressive playing. Highly contrasted in mood, they ranged from crisp, pointillistic explosions erupting all over the keyboard to collections of luminous single notes, sonic pearls that Uchida slowly gathered into an airy web.

Uchida approached the Schubert sonata with equal care, but especially in the first movement, it seemed to be a work of continuous introduction and little sense of arrival. Pastoral innocence and wary unrest alternated in the more cohesive slow second movement.

Though Beethoven was deaf by 1817, when he started composing his B flat Major sonata, the Hammerklavier, he knew exactly where he was headed in this 29th of his 32 sonatas for piano. Uchida tore through its first movement like a hurricane, courting disaster but never losing control of its unruly rhythms and pungent harmonies. Her fingerwork dazzled in the final movement's torrential arpeggios. In the adagio movement, Uchida emphasized an atmosphere of somber introspection rather than funereal weight. Melodic fragments periodically emerged in the upper registers like shards of hopeful sunshine cutting through the prevailing shadows.