The fourth of Beethoven’s five piano concertos is the only one that begins with the soloist playing alone. The melody is a statement with the nobility of a Greek temple, a quiet expanse broken only by a playful little burst of a scale, like a giggle atop the Acropolis at sunrise.

“You want to play it straightforwardly,” Yefim Bronfman, the New York Philharmonic’s artist in residence this season, said in a practice room at Avery Fisher Hall last week. He sounded out the first few notes on the piano he will use to perform the concerto with Alan Gilbert and the Philharmonic in three concerts, which start on Wednesday night. He plays the entire Beethoven cycle — including the Triple Concerto for piano, violin and cello — over the next three weeks.

“What is important for me in this beginning,” Mr. Bronfman said, “is it’s marked piano, not pianissimo” — soft, not very soft. “What happens after this introduction is the most important moment, when the orchestra takes the same note, the same B, but in a different harmony. I always feel the orchestra should be much softer than the piano. And for that to happen, you can’t be too soft.”

For a long time, Mr. Bronfman, 56, was rarely confused with the kind of musician who would make the mistake of playing too softly. Part of that was his background: Soviet-born pianists (he is from Tashkent, Uzbekistan) have long been unfairly stereotyped as pounding virtuosos rather than subtle stylists. “Bronfman the brontosaur!” Philip Roth calls him in “The Human Stain,” as the novel’s protagonist watches him play Prokofiev at Tanglewood. “Mr. Fortissimo!”