Sometimes a piano recital of challenging music will crop up out of nowhere. Pianist Susana Kasakoff, who gave the Argentine premieres of György Ligeti's dazzling :tudes pour piano, performs selections from that landmark collection and scales the heavenly crags of Charles Ives' Piano Sonata no. 2. The first in a long line of great American musical mavericks, Ives (1874-1954) explored polytonality, polyrhythms, and mobile form before most of his European contemporaries, creating some of the most beautiful cacophony on the planet in the process.

Perhaps the first world-class piece of piano music composed by an American, Ives' sonata, subtitled Concord, Mass., 1840-1890, is a musical impression of the New England transcendentalists (think Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau). While this piece is indeed "difficult listening," what overwhelms the listener is not dissonance but the massive, mystical scale of this 45-minute masterwork. Cannily, Kasakoff has included some of Ligeti's piano :tudes (numbers 5, 6, 7, 11, and 12, for those keeping count). These short pieces are dense, but also rhythmically playful and easier for the ears to digest.

Also on the program is the premiere of OID by Argentine composer Juan Pampin, who teaches in the UW's Digital Arts and Experimental Media program. He told me that OID, which is scored for piano, live electronics, and video, is "based on Argentina's national anthem, a set of dark variations using the computer to process the piano in real time as well as recordings of a military band. The video part is related to Argentina's recent political events, in particular the death of young unemployed activist Darío Santillán, brutally killed by police on June 26, 2002, in Buenos Aires." CHRISTOPHER DeLAURENTI

Susana Kasakoff performs Sat Feb 15 at 8 pm (Brechemin Auditorium in the School of Music Building, UW Campus), $5/$10.

chris@delaurenti.net