Pianist Bruce Levingston at Georgetown U.

Bruce Levingston — pianist, composer, founder and artistic director of the music foundation Premiere Commission — looks in his photographs like the essence of the concert pianist. He has the dramatic and handsome look of the artist as public figure: sensitive, serious, intellectual.

He’s been called one of “today’s most adventurous musicians” by the New York Times and “a poetic pianist with a gift for inventive and glamorous programming” by the New Yorker. The Times listed his album “Heavy Sleep” as one of the Best Classical Recordings of 2015.

But he’s also a man who understands and believes in the transformative power of music. And to that end this native of Mississippi has confronted issues surrounding the intersections of art, race and politics, premiering new compositions that echo those issues in America.

Levingston has been busy this week, with the premiere of new work at Carnegie Hall tonight (April 4) and, on Wednesday (April 6), an appearance at Georgetown University with President John DeGioia, premiering Nolan Gasser’s “An American Citizen.”

“The Carniegie Hall event features the remarkable bass-baritone Justin Hopkins performing Gasser’s ‘Repast,’ which honors the Civil Rights era leader Booker Wright,” Levingston said in a phone interview. “The Georgetown premiere is also by Gasser. It’s about a former slave, John Wesley Washington, and the portrait that was done of him by Southern artist Marie Hull.”

“Of course, my upbringing figured strongly in all this,” Levingston said. “Those issues evolve, but they’re also a part of who everyone is. These are strong parts of the lives of Southerners. There’s a reason that so many artists come from there — writers, musicians, composers, artists.”

Levingston also wrote a book about Hull, “Bright Fields: The Mastery of Marie Hull.” Along with performing “An American Citizen,” he will join in a discussion about the painting and its subject, which inspired the piece. It’s all part of a program called “Creating ‘An American Citizen,’” at 5 p.m. in Gaston Hall.

“I feel there’s a strong connection between visual art and music,” Levingston said. “Notes are like words, they contain emotions, they contain visual elements and imagery. We’ve had records of all these instances of movements and individuals — Picasso, Debussy and Matisse — the art inspiring music, the music inspiring art.”

“I think composers, and musicians are storytellers as well, and so are visual artists,” he said.