The most controversial pianist of his generation has to be Maurizio Pollini, a member of that group of Northern Italian musicians, including the composers Luigi Nono and Bruno Maderna and the conductors Giuseppe Sinopoli and Claudio Abbado, who matriculated in the thrall of Arnold Schoenberg (Nono even married Schoenberg’s daughter Nuria). Pollini became the master of styles from Machaut to Berio, recording along the way the seminal version of Pierre Boulez’s Piano Sonata No. 2 1978. He has consistently thrilled his admirers and frustrated his critics, and the most memorable of his recitals are those in which he makes the listener both love and hate his performance during the same evening.

On Sunday, Mr. Pollini brought that magnificent Boulez work to town and proved once again that he owns it. Written in 1948, it contains variations on technique with a complex structure built primarily to be destroyed as the piece progresses. Mr. Boulez, who later famously intoned the phrase “Schoenberg Is Dead,” was contemporaneously aiming to smash the Western notion of form just as Schoenberg himself was creating the first composition, the String Trio, to totally dismiss the inclusion of form or architecture as a viable musical concept. Hearing Mr. Pollini so authoritatively construct the sound world of Mr. Boulez, it is difficult to imagine that this music is now almost 60 years old.

Questions of performing technique could quickly be brushed aside, as Mr. Pollini demonstrated his uncanny ability to strike notes in their exact center, even in this most frenetic of essays. The Boulez has four movements — one of the last of his works to be so traditional — but three of them are designed for a breakneck pace. Mr. Pollini attacked this music like a starving lion, and his judicious usage of silences was at least as impressive as his percussive declamations.

The Boulez takes 28 minutes, and for 27 and three-quarters of them, Mr. Pollini dazzled with poetic enunciation and gymnastic ability. The very last page turns quiet, with an hommage to Anton Webern in its backdrop of elemental silence, and Mr. Pollini was at one with this music, achieving a state of satori and profound interpretation. And then a cellular telephone rang, causing this sensitive artist to pause for an instant, look around, and then finish his remarkable realization. This may have been the most egregious audience noise incident I have ever witnessed.

Perhaps no other pianist could come this close to filling the Isaac Stern Auditorium while featuring the music of Pierre Boulez, but Mr. Pollini also brought along Chopin and Debussy. The Chopin was a mixed bag, ranging in quality from a powerful Nocturne in C Sharp Minor, Op. 27, No. 1 and a heartmeltingly beautiful companion piece (the D Flat Major from the same set) to some sloppy renditions of the more familiar.

Mr. Pollini has come full circle in the Ballades, playing them when young as a master lyric bard, then turning forensic in later years, emphasizing their structural underpinnings rather than their melodic lines, and now, apparently, playing them “straight.” The F Major was, however, drowned by the sustaining pedal and the left hand subsumed by some fudginess in the right. His A Flat Major Polonaise was anything but heroic and simply made me yearn for Horowitz. But the crowd seemed to eat it up.

Claude Debussy’s Etudes are absolute music with no narrative connotations. Each, of course, has a technical problem to solve and Mr. Pollini proved once again that he is their conqueror, performing the Book Two pieces with alarmingly seamless facility. He reminded me of another great Italian artist, Joe DiMaggio, who made the difficult look consistently easy.

Mr. Pollini is methodical, offering this all-French program (yes, I know that Chopin was Polish, but he can certainly be classified as Parisian) as a prelude to an all-German recital in two weeks. He will be tackling Schumann and Beethoven, but what promises to be most interesting are two pieces of Karlheinz Stockhausen, a composer whose music he simply plays better than anyone else. Ever.