Haefliger piano recital at the Kimmel Center

Andreas Haefliger is a master manipulator of time. Listeners, entranced by his phrasing, might not have noticed Thursday night that he slowed the music by nearly half at the end of the exposition in the first movement of Schubert's Piano Sonata in B-flat major (D. 960).

Mozart and Liszt got similar treatment at his Philadelphia Chamber Music Society recital at the Kimmel. The German-born pianist wants you to believe that what music has to say can be more divorced from regulated tempos than typically heard, and most of the time he convinced quite nicely.

The repertoire made a point; to various degrees, pieces referenced one another. Schubert's D. 960 is embedded with the kinds of thunder and full-stop slivers of silence that wouldn't become commonplace until much later, yet it ends with the Mozartean (or even Haydn-esque) device of trying out snippets of the melody in different keys. Mozart's Adagio in B minor (K. 540) seemed in itself unmoored from time - strangely forward-looking and, for bars at a time, un-Mozartean.

Liszt's Isoldens Liebestod: Schlußszene aus Tristan und Isolde is all about time - the prolongation of it. The pianist stretched it so expansively in the beginning that it resembled a canvas growing ever more diaphanous and dangerously close to rupture.

Haefliger made no break in the music between the K. 540 Adagio and Le Mal du Pays and Vallée d'Obermann from Liszt's Années de Pèlerinage, Première Année: Suisse. The musical parlance for this is attacca. The intellectual point is to emphasize the connection, in this case the floating quality they share and the extent to which both composers were entering new territory. The Liszt testified to a pianist of nearly terrifying technique.

If the Liszt and Mozart provided plenty to love, the Schubert was less satisfying. Haefliger didn't make the most of the juxtaposed contradictions in mood (that enigmatic, seemingly foreboding low trill in the first movement that recurs). To this ear, runs were sometimes less than clearly articulated, as words smeared or dropped in a sentence. The playing sometimes grew mannered and cold. Haefliger at least is unfailingly a musician who asks why, even if he didn't give you the answer you always wanted to hear.