Pianist Pledges Allegiance to His Country’s Music : Performance: Emigre Yefim Bronfman, who plays with the Pacific Symphony this week, focuses primarily on Russian works.

You can, the adage says, take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy. That appears to hold true even if the country in question is the recently dismantled U.S.S.R. and the boy happens to be emigre pianist Yefim Bronfman.

Even though his family fled their homeland in the then-Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan when he was 14 in exchange for a better life in Israel, Bronfman has devoted much of his concert work and all of his recordings to the music of Russian composers.

“Russian music is part of my background,” Bronfman, 33, said by phone earlier this week from his hotel in Costa Mesa. “I was always exposed to this music. Maybe that’s why I feel more familiar and more at home with it.”

That’s not to suggest he plays nothing but Russian music. Bronfman also feels very comfortable with works by Mozart, Beethoven, and the Romantic composers, and he has played a considerable amount of non-Russian 20th-Century literature.

Still, audiences have come to know him as a champion of Russian music, and it is that facet of his career that will be on display tonight and Thursday, when Bronfman plays Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto with the Pacific Symphony. He has recorded that concerto, along with Nos. 1 and 5, with the Israel Philharmonic under conductor Zubin Mehta, and plans to record the remaining two concertos, again with the Israel Philharmonic. He’s also aiming to complete a cycle of Prokofiev’s piano sonatas, begun with his 1987 release of the Seventh and Eighth Sonatas.

Bronfman said he hopes in performances with the Pacific Symphony to convey “the dynamism, and dry humor, and virtuosity of this music. I would like to be able to communicate with (the audience) on a very personal level. And I would like them to come out from the concert hall feeling that they want to hear this piece again.”

It wasn’t, however, until last year’s U.S.-Soviet summit meeting in Moscow, performing at a dinner hosted by President and Mrs. Bush, that Bronfman returned to that region of the world for the first time in nearly 20 years.

“My father suffered a great deal under the Soviet regime,” said Bronfman, the younger of two children in a Jewish family in which both parents were professional musicians. Under Stalin, his father had been “somewhat luckier than others; they never came back from the Gulag, but my father did.”

Of course, any opinions they had about the Soviet government were kept to themselves. “My parents always warned us not to repeat what (we heard) at home,” he said. “The fact that we were Jewish emphasized danger. It gave (authorities) more reason to pick on us than (on) others.”

Seeking a better life for their gifted children--Bronfman’s older sister Elizabeth is today a violinist in the Israel Philharmonic--Naum and Polina Bronfman relocated the family to Israel, where they would reunite with Polina’s family. By 1973, Bronfman--who had begun to study piano at the age of 7 under his mother’s tutelage--was sufficiently accomplished to audition for conductor Zubin Mehta. Two years later, he made his North American debut with Mehta and the Montreal Symphony.

In 1976, he came to the United States to study with Rudolf Serkin at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Following a term in the Israeli army--a duty required of all Israeli citizens--he returned to spend a year in Vermont, where Serkin resided.

Bronfman’s list of teachers includes some of the greatest pianists of this era. After Serkin, he worked with Rudolf Firkusny at the Juilliard School and, privately, with Leon Fleisher.

“You know, I’ve been very fortunate with the teachers that I’ve had,” he said. “They never imposed anything. They were always very kind. The good teacher is the one who teaches you independence first of all, because there is always a day when you finish school and you find yourself on your own. . . . They always let me do things myself . . . (and) taught me to be a completely independent musician with my own ideas. I did my own experiments. I made my own mistakes, and not their mistakes.”

When he is not touring, Bronfman, who acquired U.S. citizenship in 1989, lives in New York, though constant concertizing keeps him away for long periods. His concert schedule typically numbers more than 100 appearances yearly, and this season alone he will appear with nearly a dozen major U.S. and Canadian orchestras.

The pianist relishes the exchange of ideas and the camaraderie he finds in chamber music. He has collaborated with the Emerson, Cleveland, Guarneri and Juilliard quartets, and frequently has partnered Isaac Stern, as he did at the July summit. He said he plans to record with Stern all the Mozart Sonatas for Violin and Piano. During the coming year, he also anticipates recording piano trios by Tchaikovsky and Anton Arensky with violinist Cho-Liang Lin and cellist Gary Hoffman.

Beyond the exchange of musical ideas, Bronfman looks forward to touring with friends: “This business can be very lonely. Traveling all the time, you go from hotel to hotel. You don’t necessarily know people in town. When you play chamber music it is different--you travel with your colleagues, and you perform together, and you have a good time together. So I think that’s a wonderful part of a career, to play chamber music.

“But,” he added, as a soloist “things improve with time because you go back to the same places where you made friends already. . . . It’s not as lonely as it used to be 10 years ago.”

* Yefim Bronfman will play Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with the Pacific Symphony tonight at 8 at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. The orchestra also will play Olivier Knussen’s “‘The Way to Castle Yonder” and Brahms’ Symphony No. 1. Tickets: $12 to $36. A concert preview with Pacific Symphony composer-in-residence Frank Ticheli begins at 7 p.m. Also Thursday. Information: (714) 556-2787.