New York Philharmonic Music Director Alan Gilbert has called Israeli-born pianist Inon Barnatan “a complete artist: a wonderful pianist, a probing intellect, passionately committed.” Barnatan’s May program explores multiple approaches to the idea of variations in music, opening with Handel’s Chaconne, built around an eight-bar theme, and concluding with Brahms’s use of a simple theme from Handel’s First Harpsichord Suite and 25 variations of astonishing variety. The work closes with a masterful and exultant fugue built upon a four-note motif from the original theme.