Each new earthquake aftershock off the coast of Japan comes brings additional misery for the Asian nation and a renewed upswelling of sympathetic grief worldwide. It also creates an increased desire to help out, and later this month, that’s just what a concert at Florida International University will aim to do.

Pianist Valentina Lisitsa, a fine Ukranian-born pianist who won the 1991 Murray Dranoff Two-Piano Competition with her husband, Alexei Kuznetsoff, and who has appeared as accompanist with violinist Hilary Hahn, will give a recital April 21 at the Wertheim Performing Arts Center for earthquake relief.

All of the proceeds will go to the United Way’s Operation Helping Hands to be used for earthquake victims, said concert organizer Julian Kreeger.

Also co-sponsoring are Kreeger’s own Friends of Chamber Music, his son Abram’s Piano Lovers concert series, FIU itself, the Dranoff organization, James Judd’s Miami Music Project, and Bob Luptak of the Boca Steinway Gallery, he said.

Kreeger said the concert came about when Hahn’s tour of Japan with Lisitsa was canceled because of the March 11 quake and subsequent tsunami. News reports suggest that as many as 25,000 people have died in the disaster.

“We were talking and she said she’d like to do a benefit for them, and I offered to set it up for her,” he said. “It’s a good way to help out in a bad situation.”

Late last month at Spivey Hall in Atlanta, Hahn and Lisitsa performed a Japan benefit concert in which proceeds went to Direct Relief International’s Japan Relief and Recovery Fund.

Lisitsa’s program at FIU will include the Beethoven Moonlight Sonata (No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 27, No. 2), a group of Chopin nocturnes and etudes, and music of Schumann. Kuznetsoff will join his wife for either the Chopin Rondo or a movement from one of the Rachmaninov two-piano suites, Kreeger said.

The concert is set for 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 21. Minimum suggested contribution is $25.

Not all of us can physically help out in the danger zone, much as we would like to. But if we can’t do that, attending a concert in the knowledge that the money will be going to such an important cause is in some ways just as good.

Hearing music, too, reminds us of our common humanity; if music is not quite a universal language then it comes very close, and you could argue that at the very least it’s a universal balm. Here’s hoping Lisitsa gets a strong turnout.